My doctoral thesis will be in the area of African literature — specifically autobiographies.

What bothers me about how many in the West seem to tackle African studies is this obsession with “representation”, which, in my view is derivative from a very Western psychological perspective wherein one’s “image” is considered reflexively to be one of the greatest determinants for personal success.

When I speak to Africans from Zimbabwe, however (and I am myself a white African from Zimbabwe), self-representation is not the most important issue in their lives, either subjectively or politically. They are often more interested in practical issues of survival and also — as you have mentioned in another entry — in having others show respect for black nationalism. If this nationalist approach evokes notions of representation, then these are different sorts of representation than that most prevalent in the west. It has more to do with attitudes of self-determination and identification with the leader as symbolic of that self determination, rather than to do with considerations which could be framed, “How do I look to others as an African because of pictures shown to them at the movies?”

That kind of concern is much more that of a self-consciously politicised, greedy for economic gain, calculating … westerner.

But westerners, in their mistaking epistemology, often apply the same psychological framework to Africans and “their interests” as they are used to applying to themselves.

As for East Asia (the place I know best) there is some stuff that probably would not matter. Kenzaburo Oe’s A Personal Matter has a character who obsesses about Africa, but that is just using Africa as a conveniently blank Other. There is a lot of that. I can’t see why it would matter much to African history. I assume you know Phillip Snow’s The Star Raft, which has some stuff on Chinese attitudes towards Africa in the context of development aid, where it would actually matter. I would have to think that some of the Africans who studied in China or Russia must have written memoirs or something by now.

Another topic you might want to consider is the relationship between the imperial and popular and post ’45 aid-organization discourses and the academic discourse you are asking them to join. Donald Lopez did a very interesting book called Prisoners of Shangri-la on basically that topic but dealing with Tibet. I liked the book a lot because he traced the development of the popular discourse very well (Tibet has a much more unitary image than Africa) but also because he was pretty clear that this popular discourse and the academic one were closely related. Of course there is a lot of stuff on how modern Asian studies is connected to the imperial projects.