Lindfors focuses on representative Africans and pseudo-Africans, especially several individuals and groups who gained notoriety in nineteenth-century Britain and elsewhere performing in public
as typical specimens of a specific ethnic group. These were some of the celebrities who gave body to Western concepts of African difference; just as the battle against slavery was being won by
abolitionists, the war against racism in European thought was being lost. Throughout Europe and America native Africans were stereotyped as brutish, dimwitted, naïve, emotional, undisciplined,
and uncultured. While the people being exhibited were picked because they were abnormal in some spectacular way, they were presented as the norm, which played into Western racial thought that
posited white superiority. There are 10 chapters: courting the Hottentot Venus; the bottom line: African caricature in Georgian England; Ira Aldridge at Covent Garden; clicks and clucks:
Victorian reactions to San speech; Charles Dickens and the Zulus; a Zulu view of Victorian London; Dr. Kahn and the Niam-Niams; the United African twins on tour: a captivity narrative; Circus
Africans; Africa’s first Olympians. Annotation ©2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
