By Europe, out of Africa: White women writers on farms and their African invention (Olive Schreiner, Nadine Gordimer, Karen Blixen, Elspeth Huxley, Doris Lessing, South Africa, Denmark, Zimbabwe)

By Europe, Out of Africa: White Women Writers on Farms and Their African Invention analyzes the cultural role of white women writers on farms in Africa, paying particular attention to the inventive oscillations in their work. Focussing on Olive Schreiner and Karen Blixen, but extending beyond them to Elspeth Huxley, Doris Lessing, and Nadine Gordimer, the study takes its structure from Blixen's famous opening to Out of Africa, "I had a farm in Africa," and deconstructs the apparent simplicity and certainty of that statement.; Section one shows how the ability to talk as "I" involves complex negotiations of racial, gender, and class identity. While Blixen's African experience enables her to forge an aristocratic identity by representing the loss of her farm in terms of pastoral elegy, the mission-raised Schreiner presents her farm with relentless realism, looking for her Utopia in the future when women can take their place in the world without restriction.; Section two, leaning heavily on the work of Raymond Williams in The Country and the City, looks at the politics of landscape in Schreiner and Blixen, attempting to weigh the ideological baggage that comes with literary accounts of rural life in English. A comparison between Elspeth Huxley's detective fiction, Doris Lessing's The Grass is Singing, and Blixen's account of the death of a Kenyan farm-laborer called Kitosch shows how the European discourses of ethnography, detective fiction, and colonial law all work together to claim disciplinary control over Africa and Africans.; Section three argues that "Africa" is a European invention, remarkably consistently used by Europeans as a site to write their own history. Ranging from images of Africa in Vergil and Petrarch, through what Martin Bernal calls the "fabrication" of Ancient Greece from 1785 on, to the canonical status of the racist image of Africa in Heart of Darkness, this section concludes that Europeans have not just written themselves through "African" experience, but attempted to write themselves into the African landscape through their graves and memorials.