'Africa Writing Europe offers critical readings of the meaning and presence of Europe in a variety of African literary texts. The first of its kind, it shifts the focus from questions of African identity to readings which delineate ideas of Europe also in texts written specifically in an African context. It seeks to place the representations of Europe in an historical context by including a number of different and often conflicting definitions of the Africa-Europe opposition, definitions that are traced to differences between the specific geographical and cultural locations both in the African and in the European context, including an Eastern European perspective as well as the metropolitan centres of Britain and France.
The readings engage with the legacy of white domination manifested as slavery, colonialism, and apartheid as well as with the entangled histories and new perspectives developed through exile, both as voluntary and as forced migration. Several essays address the gendered dimension of the Africa-Europe opposition and relate it to other intersecting oppositions, such as the rural and the urban, the private and the public, in their analysis of representations of femininity and masculinity in the literary texts. (Publisher's blurb)
In this essay, Gabeba explores 'the meanings of the words through etymology of the notorious word 'kaffir' and the analysis of two literary texts: Mr Chameleon (2005) by Tatamkhulu Afrika; and Castaway (1999) by Yvette Christianse. Mr Chameleon and Castaway are both autobiographical works that allude to the place of Islam in colonial and apartheid South Africa.' (p. 69)
