Fictioning Namibia as a Space of Desire

Title: Fictioning Namibia as a Space of Desire
Subtitle: An excursion into the literary space of Namibia during colonialism, apartheid and the Liberation Struggle
Author: Renzo Baas
Series: Basel Southern Africa Studies 12
Publisher: Basler Afrika Bibliographien
Basel, Switzerland 2019
ISBN 9783906927084 / ISBN 978-3-906927-08-4
Softcover, 17 x 24 cm, 286 pages

About: Fictioning Namibia as a Space of Desire

Modern-day Namibian history has largely been shaped by three major eras: German colonial rule, South African apartheid occupation, and the Liberation Struggle. It was, however, not only military conquest that laid the cornerstone for the colony, but also how the colony was imagined, the ‘dream’ of this colony. As a tool of discursive worldmaking, literature has played a major role in providing a framework in which to ‘dream’ Namibia, first from outside its borders, and then from within. In Fictioning Namibia as a Space of Desire, Renzo Baas employs Henri Lefebvre’s city–countryside dialectic and reworks it in order to uncover how fictional texts played an integral part in the violent acquisition of a foreign territory. Through the production of myths around whiteness, German and South African authors designed a literary space in which control, destruction, and the dehumanisation of African peoples are understood as a natural order, one that is dictated by history and its linear continuation. These European texts are offset by Namibia’s first novel by an African, offering a counter-narrative to the colonial invention that was (German) South West Africa.

Content: Fictioning Namibia as a Space of Desire

Introduction
Producing Certain Spaces
Literature on and about Namibia
Literature List
Terms and Conditions
Looking Forward
Social and Literary Space
From Relative to Social Space
The Social Space of Henri Lefebvre
Social Space and Literary Space
The Colonial Era: War, Toil, and Diamonds
Introduction to the Texts
Emptied Landscapes
The Garden
The White Female Colonialist
The Apartheid Era: The Trust in Maps and Guns
Introduction to the Texts
Emptied Landscapes (?)
Technologies of Conquest and Domination
(De) Constructing the White Male Explorer
The Namibian Moment: Learning to Sing
Introduction to the Text
Main Spaces of the Narrative
Resistance and Disobedience
The Resistance of One, the Resistance of Many
Merging the Past, Present, and Future
Conclusion
Producing the 'Other' (and oneself)
A Colonial Network of Spaces and Strategies
The Metropole in Crisis
A Root of the Metropolitan Crisis
Monologic and Dialogic Narratives
Bibliography
Index