Envisioning the Worst: Representations of "Hottentots" in Early-modern England

Front Cover
University of Delaware Press, 2001 - 289 pages
"The descriptions of Africa's southern-most people that appear in travel narratives and collections, geography books, and other textbooks of learning written from the first contact between English sailors and the Cape Khoikhoi in 1591 until the establishment of the British Cape Colony in the 1820s only tell part of the story about the invention and construction of "Hottentots." No other indigenous society was described so negatively or appropriated for such extensive use in domestic discourses. Indeed, the countless number of literal and figurative "Hottentot" references that appear in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century journals, letters, poetry, novels, and drama, as well as in scientific, imperialist, political, and abolitionist writings demonstrate how the very idea of them figures in crucial ways in the early modern consciousness as well as in some of the period's most critical debates, especially those concerning race, nationalism, and gender.".
 

Contents

First Contact
32
Spreading the Word
60
The Story of Cory
87
Hottentots at Home and Abroad
118
Challenging the Constructions
151
An Information Age
176
The Most Wretched of the Human Race
207
Remembering Hottentots
238
Notes
245
Bibliography
271
Index
284
Copyright

Common terms and phrases

Bibliographic information