White women writers’ representations of Africa as “contact zones” narratives: the case of Alexandra Fuller

In my paper, I try to re-read gendered stereotypes and recurrent representations, and examine white women’s writings on Africa as “contact zones” narratives, in a new perspective that is without any doubt debatable, but also highly stimulating. Above all, I consider the case of the British writer Alexandra Fuller, who was born in 1969 in England but grew up in Africa and then moved to the United States. On the one hand, Fuller belongs to a well-established lineage of English writings on Africa and she is aware of the white colonial imaginary (conveniently revisited in postcolonial times), on the other, she creates a series of narrations “in between” different cultures and perspectives. By representing herself as “African in mind and soul”, she aims at becoming part of the African literary tradition. Fuller reframes the interpretation of Africa in the European collective imagination, putting at the centre of her writings a world where differences are portrayed across and within the subject and the landscape. In this sense, she encourages a negotiation of British and African points of view.