Phantom Afrika

Revised and Expanded New Edition

Michel Leiris is being rediscovered as a key witness to colonial looted art. In fact, it is hard to find an author who candidly describes the questionable practices of ethnographers appropriating objects in Africa—rescue through theft—from the perspective of the perpetrators. After these revelations, ethnologists initially disparaged him as an unserious "literary figure," only to later recognize Phantom Africa (1934) as a model for experimental first-person ethnography. From today's perspective, the diary of the secretary of the legendary, state-funded research and collection expedition from Dakar to Djibouti (1931-1933), the first and largest of its kind, offers perhaps even more fundamental insights into the paradoxes of field research in the colonial era, inspired by surrealism and psychoanalysis. For the surrealist in a pith helmet is primarily one thing: unflinching. Just as he dissects the contradictions and obsessions of scientists, he documents his exoticist and colonialist notions. Leiris only became an anti-colonialist through this experience. Thus, the reader witnesses how a white European man, in search of transcendent experiences in Africa, ultimately comes to confront his inner demons—not the worst prerequisite for exploring the spirits and poetry of the "Other."

In the 1980s, it became a cult book for the ethnoboom generation in West Germany, and the German translation of L'Afrique fantôme had long been out of print. In this new edition, which includes Leiris' letters to his wife, this singular and epochal testimony to the contradictions of colonialism—between the greed for possession and the longing for obsession—is finally available again.