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Africa’s Reductive Images, Contesting the Sources, and New Generations as Passive Victims: A Reflection on Historical and Global Representational Practices
JOURNAL OF YOUTH RESEARCHES
acteristics of oriental narratives, their drives, impacts, as well as their shared functions
with eurocentrism, we can claim to extend the oriental territory to the entire Africa.
Korasick contends that the negative imagery found in the oriental-historical literature and
the consequential “othering” of non-Western cultures can be taken as a proof of ‘the
hostile intent of the west towards the rest’. Accordingly, the common premise is that the
Western world projected, undesirable, and “racist”, imagery on non-Western societies as
justification to dominate and impose its rule (2005: 5).
Generally, Oriental literatures, either through exclusion or distortion, had especially publi-
cized Africa as having no substantial historical values which in turn would mean no signif-
icant cultural values, based on connections between cultural history and cultural memory
(Confino, 1997). Confino shows that the concept of culture has become for historians
a compass of a sort that governs questions of interpretation, explanation and method
(1997:1386 -1403).
Exoticism, another historically-inscribed idea and practice of misrepresentation of black
masculinity and femininity, is also deeply situated in the historical practices of slavery,
colonialism and imperialism. Hereunder, I attempt to briefly discuss the practices and
impacts of exoticisms mainly based-on Hall’s (1997: 262-264) accounts and reflections.
During the era of slavery and the aftermath, at the center of ‘racial’ power exercised by
the male slave master was the denial of some masculine attributes to black male slaves,
including authority, familial responsibility and property ownership (Hall, 1997: 262). Ac-
cordingly, black men have adopted those patriarchal values such as physical strength,
sexual expertise and being in control, as a means of survival against repressive and vi-
olent system of subordination. Slave masters often exercised their authority over black
male slaves, by depriving them of all the attributes of responsibility, paternal and familial
authority, treating them as children. Hall calls this as ‘infantilization’ (1997: 262).
In illustrating and contending the degrading of African femininity, scholars take commonly
utilized historical - representational ‘case’ of an African woman, Saartje (or Sarah) Baart-
man, commonly known as ‘The Hottentot Venus’. Saartje was brought to England in 1810
by a Boer farmer from the Cape region of South Africa. She was then regularly exhibited
for over five years in London and Paris (Gilman, 1985: 204-242, Hall, 1997 and Palmburg,
2001: 54-75).
In her early ‘performances’, she was produced on a raised stage like a wild beast, came
and went from her cage when ordered, ‘more like a bear in a chain than a human being’
(Hall, 1997: 264).
She became famous among the public as a popular ‘spectacle’, commemorated in bal-
lads, cartoons, illustrations, in melodramas and newspaper reports. She also became
