Africa in the Bengali Imagination

This book examines textual representations of Africa in the Bengali nationalist and diasporic thought from 1928 to 1973. It is the first full-length study of the development of ‘Africa’ as an idea and historical reality through the writings of five Bengali writers including, the Bengali novelist Bibhutibhusan Bandapadhyay (1894-1950), the children’s author Hemendrakumar Roy (1888-1963), the poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), the playwright Ganesh Bagchi (1923-2016) and the surrealist poet and founding editor of Transition magazine Rajat Neogy (1938-1995). The volume shows how these writers engage with the idea of Africa and how that helped in the construction of Bengali cultural identity during the freedom struggle, the Partition of Bengal in 1947 and the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. First of its kind, this book will be an excellent read for the students and scholars of literature, comparative literature, history, cultural studies, post-colonial studies, South Asian studies, African studies and also to the Bengali Diaspora across the globe.

Mahruba T. Mowtushi is Assistant Professor Department of English & Humanities, University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh, Dhaka, Bangladesh. She has completed her PhD from King’s College, London in 2016.