Inventing the Desert and the Jungle: Creating identity through landscape in African and European culture

This dissertation traces representations of the "extreme" landscapes of jungle and desert in twentieth-century African and European literary works, and explores how such representations both reflected and influenced identity formation during colonialism and after. Polar opposites but equally "extreme," the jungle and the desert landscapes came to represent the outer limits of Europe's colonial expansion, and also the extreme outer limits of difference---difference from European topography, and radical cultural difference as well.;During the colonial period, artistic representations of these spaces grappled with that confrontation in ways that left the jungle and the desert untethered from historical or geographical specificity. These depictions could reflect or reinforce a European identity based on power and control over nature (and people labeled "primitive" and therefore part of nature). Postcolonial African representations of jungle and desert reinscribe these spaces within a long cultural and temporal continuum, which was altered or imbalanced by colonial intervention. In African novels, desert and jungle are no longer simply metaphors or symbols (though they do retain symbolic value); they are historically and geographically specific, and can serve to postulate "authentic" modes of governance to restore equilibrium to societies upturned by colonialism.;In the first chapter, I analyze Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) against Jean de Brunhoff's Babar series (1931-37), using the theme of scale to show how the depiction of the tropical forest in each work deals in very different ways with the "culture clash" described above: the former portrays the jungle as a symbol of the incommensurability of the two cultures, stylistically enacting the impossibility of understanding and questioning the hierarchical European thinking on which the colonial project is built. The latter attempts to contain the chaos and enormity of the landscape---and hence of difference itself---within established scales of thinking which maintained the narrative of a kind of evolutionary hierarchy; yet such attempts at containment ultimately demonstrate the limits of colonial powers of representation. Though differing in genre and audience, both texts are seminal, highly influential, and extremely widely read, and both have irrevocably shaped our culture's perception of the jungle and of Africa.;The second chapter focuses on Centrafrican author Etienne Goyemide's 1981 novel, Le silence de la foret, a work which appropriates and subverts the classic European jungle adventure tale, using irony to suggest the artificiality and decadence of postcolonial westernized African society and government, and depicting the Equatorial Rainforest and its indigenous inhabitants as the locus and keepers of a healthier, more balanced, appropriately-scaled social structure. The chapter reacts this work in conversation with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's writings on natural law and natural man, as well as Homi Bhabha's notions of mimicry, still within the conceptual framework of scale begun in the first chapter. This chapter and the fourth re-contextualize postcolonial novels in relationship to indigenous beliefs, portrayed in the texts themselves as alternatives to "unnatural" neocolonial power relations.;The third chapter addresses the temporal aspect of scale within the context of the Sahara Desert. Using Wai Chee Dimock's concept of "deep time" as a springboard, this chapter studies historical references and depictions of the Sahara in Tahar Djaout's L'invention du desert (1987), Albert Memmi's Le desert (1977), and Rachid Boudjedra's Timimoun (1994) to posit a construction of postcolonial North African identity based on a longue duree perspective which resists the homogenizing efforts of both French colonialism and post-independence nationalism and fundamentalism in the region.;The fourth chapter is devoted to an Arabic-language novel, Ibrahim al-Koni's Nazif al-H&dotbelow;ajar (The Bleeding of the Stone , 1990, tr. 2002). This Tuareg writer also reappropriates the space of the desert, basing his portrayal of the desert on Sufi philosophy and Tuareg cosmology. Once again within the framework of notions of scale, order, and proportion, I explore the Sufi ideas of al-fana' or extinction/emptiness and wah&dotbelow;dat al-wujud, or the oneness of existence, symbolically represented by both the desert and the protagonist in the novel. By putting this novel in conversation with Western theories of categorization (following Agamben's work, The Open, on the human-animal distinction), and looking at intertextual resonances with the Buddhist Jataka tale, "The Banyan Deer," explicit and implicit references to Islamic scriptures, and the preponderance of Sufi and Tuareg imagery and symbolism, I argue that this novel questions the primacy of Western novelistic and philosophical structures, and offers an alternative "reading" of the desert as both ecosystem and metaphor.;The conclusion suggests the direction of future research on the subject, turning toward visual representations of jungle and desert. In summary, this project brings new understanding to colonial and postcolonial questions of self and other, using a study of landscape to reexamine literary and artistic portrayals of national and cultural identity. It demonstrates that if European colonial literature portrays the jungle and desert as too big and different to be understood, African postcolonial literature attempts to reclaim cultural identity through specific, historically rooted, rebalanced depictions of jungle and desert as an attempt to recover from the destabilizing effects of Europe's colonial identity struggle.