Africa meant a variety of things to the Europeans who settled there in the early decades of the twentieth century. For representatives of the British Empire, the land was an outpost of national expansion, a source of natural resources and inexpensive labor necessary for the defense and expansion of the empire. For the average citizen, the land represented the possibility of wealth and privilege unavailable in the home country. For the wealthy who had squandered their inheritance at home, Africa represented a place of new beginnings. For the truly wealthy, Africa represented a new kind of playground, "a winter home for aristocrats," as one Uganda Railroad poster advertised. In its unknown and unmapped expanses, "man" could test himself against the elements, the animals, and time. "Untamed" and "undomesticated," it seemed a frontier of relaxed mores and unimaginable adventures not yet contaminated by bourgeois conventionality and emasculating comforts. The Africans, decentered and disempowered in their own space, watched as they continued to lose ownership of their land, labor, and culture.

Coming to this land, European settlers brought with them the "discursive territory" of Africa. And so, before turning to the autobiographical texts of Isak Dinesen and Beryl Markham, I want to follow one strand of the ideology of blackness that emerged in the nineteenth century as prelude to the great colonializing moment of the early twentieth century. Until it was abolished in the early nineteenth century, the slave trade reflected and effected certain justificatory discursive practices pertaining to black sexuality. Categorized as less civilized, located closer to nature, black Africans were identified with reproductive capacities that serviced the slave economy. Significantly, after the slave trade was abolished and imperialist expansion into the continent gained momentum, Europeans shifted their locus of identification, linking black Africans increasingly to "uncivilized" practices. "When the taint of slavery fused with sensational reports about cannibalism, witchcraft, and apparently shameless sexual customs," suggests Patrick Brantlinger, "Africa emerged draped in that pall of darkness that the Victorians themselves accepted as reality" [Brantlinger, "Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent," in "Race," Writing, and Difference, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (1986)]. In identifying the physical characteristics of black sexuality as markers also of prostitutes (the most sexualized of white women) and in describing the sexual practices of primitive tribes as forms of prostitution, medical anthropologists during the century linked black sexuality and prostitution as two sources of social corruption and disease (syphilis in particular).

European scientists and scholars thus projected onto the native African abnormal sexual appetite, that "dark" force lurking inside "civilized man," threatening the very basis of Western culture. Yet this "Africa" beckoned to Europeans, inviting the adventurer and the missionary into its vast spaces with its promise of illicit pleasure and imperial power. Journey into the jungle in search of treasure became journey into "the heart of darkness," as treasure and pleasure, economic and erotic desires, tangled. The image of Africa constructed by Europeans both invited and justified colonization, on one hand the project of "civilizing" the native Africans, on the other the aggressive expression of the will to power, the desire to dominate, appropriate, and transform. Thus Africa itself became, as did the Orient, a space effectively "feminized" by an imperial Europe.

There are resonances here between colonial ideologies of race and patriarchal ideologies of gender, as well as radical differences. Western discursive practices assigned to woman the potential for a contaminating and disruptive sexuality that it ascribed also to the very body and the body social of the African. Thus both (black) African and (white) woman threatened to lure Western man into some forbidden, unholy, sexually clandestine place. Tellingly, Freud invoked the Victorian phrase describing Africa as "the dark continent" in his twentieth-century metaphor for the inscrutability of female sexuality. Coupling sexuality and Africa in this way, argues Sander Gilman, "Freud ties the image of female sexuality to the image of the colonial black and to the perceived relationship between the female's ascribed sexuality and the Other's exoticism and pathology" [Gilman, "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature," in "Race," Writing, and Difference]. This discursive conjunction of the erotic, exotic, and pathologic points to the specular bases upon which the (white, male) subject of Western humanism identifies himself as disembodied. "Masculine disembodiment," argues Judith Butler, "is only possible on the condition that women occupy their bodies as their essential and enslaving identities…. From th[e] belief that the body is Other, it is not a far leap to the conclusion that others are their bodies, while the masculine 'I' is a noncorporeal soul" [Butler, "Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory, and Psychoanalytical Discourse," in Feminism/Post-modernism, edited by Linda J. Nicholson, 1990]. The patriarchal assignment of embodiedness to woman, mapped by Butler, parallels the colonial assignment of primitive sexuality to the African. As a result of in/corporation, woman and African remain other-than-fully human, on the one hand childlike and on the other monstrous. And always, they require some kind of "parental" oversight.

Yet despite or, rather, because of this essentializing gaze, both woman and African remain the potential site of disruption—subjects waiting to speak. As Hélène Cixous warns: "The Dark Continent is neither dark nor unexplorable.—It is still unexplored only because we've been made to believe that it was too dark to be explorable. And because they want to make us believe that what interests us is the white continent" ["The Laugh of the Medusa," in New French Feminisms: An Anthology, edited by Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, 1981]. What interests me here is "the white continent" of autobiography and the way in which two white women living on the frontier of colonial Kenya traversed the discursive borderlands of gender, race, and autobiographical practice. Since canonical Western autobiography functions as one of those discourses that inscribe white male subjectivity, Isak Dinesen and Beryl Markham of necessity engaged the colonial discourses of African otherness as they engaged the androcentricity of Western autobiography.

Isak Dinesen and Beryl Markham knew each other, if casually. They loved the same man at the same time. As white women in colonial Kenya, however, they shared more than a lover. On the one hand, they shared their privileged status vis-à-vis the native Africans, a privileged status manifest throughout their texts in the offhanded assumptions and conventional rhetoric of colonialism. (Of this, I will say more later.) On the other, they shared a marginal positionality in relation to white men, caught as they were in their embodiment; and this embodiment they shared with the Africans, who vis-à-vis Europeans were cast in the essentialism of race as surely as the women were cast in an essentialism of gender. (I do not mean to imply here that they experienced the same degree of marginalization as the Africans. They did not.) Chafing at the confinements of female embodiment, they discovered that residency on the colonial "frontier" provided them an arena of resistance. At the margins of the empire, far from the European center's hold, they could as white women break through the borderland of female embodiment and achieve a mobility of autobiographical script unavailable to them in the "home" country. Thus both Markham and Dinesen claim to be born "out of Africa" to use the phrase as horse trainers such as Markham use it. Attesting to the mystery that for them is "Africa," both represent the space of this mysterious otherness as a territory in which to escape the kind of identity that would have been theirs had they remained in Denmark or England. And yet, while both wrote haunting autobiographical accounts of their African experience, they offer the reader radically divergent readings of subjectivity in and through Africa. I want to read West with the Night and Out of Africa against one another, and to read them in ways attentive to the textual figure of the indigenous African woman, in order to explore the complications of colonized place, gender, and race in the politics of self-representation….

"In my life at the farm," [Dinesen writes in Out of Africa], "I saw few women, and I got into the habit of sitting, at the end of the day, for a quiet hour with the old woman and the girls in Farah's house." Dinesen figures the Somali women as mothers, wives, and sisters sequestered within patriarchal institutions and systems of meaning, what she elsewhere called "ancient citadels of males." Furthermore, the women are physically enclosed within yards of elaborate clothes, signs of male ownership of and in/vestment in them. Embodied testaments to male privilege, they are "luxuries," commodified in systems of exchange. Yet Dinesen insinuates into this locale of enclosure a politics of agency by foregrounding the other woman's sources of power: her intelligence, her cunning, her sophisticated manipulation of male investments. Most important, she identifies the other woman, as she identifies herself, with Scheherazade, the colonized woman who escapes literal and symbolic death by fabricating bold and imaginative tales. "Sometimes, to entertain me," she writes, "they would relate fairy tales in the style of the Arabian Nights, mostly in the comical genre, which treated love with much frankness." Only apparently passive, the Somali women stake out a locale of female desire, empowerment, subversive laughter: "It was a trait common to all these tales that the heroine, chaste or not, would get the better of the male characters and come out of the tale triumphant."

Dinesen identifies the old Somali mother with a former dispensation characterized by matriarchal rule. A "Sibylline" figure "with a little smile on her face," she is the wise witch, the living trace of an earlier dispensation. "Within this enclosed women's world," she writes,

I felt the presence of a great ideal, without which the garrison would not have carried on so gallantly; the idea of a Millennium when women were to reign supreme in the world. The old mother at such times would take on a new shape, and sit enthroned as a massive dark symbol of that mighty female deity who had existed in old ages, before the time of the Prophet's God.

The old mother becomes the great mother, to use Erich Neumann's phrase [from The Great Mother: An Analysis of an Archetype, 1963], a matriarchal witch-goddess predating the great prophet Mohammed. And her subversive smile signals the residual matrilineal linkage backward in time through this maternal heritage. It also points forward to a fictive Millennium, an already and always deferred possibility, yet an always potential site of laughter's disruption.

While Dinesen elsewhere presents herself as entertainer and her guests as entertained, in this scene the white woman reverses the pattern, presenting herself as the listener who sits at the feet of the other woman. The reversal signals not the subordination of white woman to black woman, but rather membership in a sisterhood of female storytellers, in a community of women who "remember" the time past when the great goddess reigned supreme. For Dinesen too has lost "the forest matriarchy" she figures in her representation of Africa. In 1931, after seventeen years in colonial Kenya, the Danish woman was forced by bankruptcy to return to her family home in Rungstedlund, Denmark, where she would remain the rest of her life. Describing the circumstances in which the Ngoma about to be danced in honor of her leaving is canceled, Dinesen writes toward the end of her narrative: "Perhaps they realized at once how completely the Ngoma was off, for the reason that there was no longer anybody to dance to, since I no longer existed" (emphasis mine). Abjection, the dispersal of "identity," attended expulsion from the paradisiacal Africa. And so, "out of Africa," Karen Blixen experienced the loss of autobiographical story that comes from returning to the same old story of bourgeois embodiment. Enclosed in her mother's house, she could only dream of the past and in dreaming create the myth of an "African" identity. Like the Somali women, then, she is forced to tell stories to save her very "life," to abandon herself to writing in an elegant dance of loss.

"The discovery of the dark races was to me a magnificent enlargement of all my world," Dinesen writes early in the text. In this expanded universe she claims to have discovered a truer "home" than the one she left in Denmark: "In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be." Figured as a place of sensual pleasure, a garden of delight profoundly different and distant from the repressive, cold environment of Denmark, this "Africa" invites Dinesen to luxuriate in a rich, thick sensuality—a sensuality whose traces are then deployed throughout the text from the very first pages when she immerses the reader in descriptive passages ranging across the landscape and through the smells, colors, sounds, sights, the very feel of Africa. Sensuality resonates through the music of Africa and the music of the text's voice: "When you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find that it is the same in all her music." Africa's very air is a sensual medium. Walking in the morning, she writes, "you are not on earth but in dark deep waters, going ahead along the bottom of the sea." Living becomes "swimming" as life takes place inside a global amniotic fluid always washing across the body.

Learning from the Africans how to live "in accordance with [the landscape]" this white woman represents herself as being at one with Africa in a powerful commingling of subjectivity and place: "The grass was me, and the air, the distant invisible mountains were me, the tired oxen were me. I breathed with the slight night-wind in the thorntrees." Geographically her farm blurs seamlessly into the wild space of Africa. She writes of the adopted Lulu that she "came in from the wild world to show that we were on good terms with it, and she made my house one with the African landscape, so that nobody could tell where the one stopped and the other began." Boundaries between human and animal are likewise blurred. Animals take on attributes of human beings; human beings are identified through animals. And metaphysically good and evil blend into one another. She writes of the Africans that their "assurance, [their] art of swimming, they had, I thought, because they had preserved a knowledge that was lost to us by our first parents; Africa, amongst the continents, will teach it to you: that God and the Devil are one, the majesty coeternal, not two uncreated but one uncreated, and the Natives neither confounded the persons nor divided the substance." In Dinesen's "Africa," human beings, animals, space, metaphysical forces commingle with one another in revelries and reveries of interdependence and nondifferentiation.

"Africa distilled" thus signifies for Dinesen a space outside the menacing borders of a European "enlightenment" that brutally disjoins "self" and "other," a space uncontaminated by patriarchal arrangements and representational repertoires with their self-splitting repressions, an "Eden" uncalibrated by "man's" time and its gendered autobiographical scripts. Identified with animism, sensuality, transport, pleasure, mystery, music, laughter, power, "she" is the great goddess, nourishing "matrix space," locale of union and of jouissance, all that Julia Kristeva ascribes to the semiotic and Dinesen herself to female sexuality ["Women's Time," in Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology, edited by Nannerl O. Keohane, Michelle Z. Rosaldo, and Barbara C. Gelpi, 1982].

In this space Dinesen positions herself as the great goddess's daughter, recovering from patriarchal representations of female subjectivity through reclamation of the repressed body and enactment of an empowered autobiographical script. "To ride, to shoot arrows, to tell the truth" reads the inscription that opens the text—a manifesto of a mythical Diana, the active, effectual, independent woman, not the enclosed woman of bourgeois domestic scenes. Throughout the narrative "the lioness Blixen" assumes by turns the roles of empress, creatrix, healer, priest, protector, judge, genie (or jinn, in Islamic mythology). Figuring herself as honorable, resourceful, courageous, dependable, hardworking, and socially responsible, she identifies herself as a hybrid of "manliness" and "womanliness."

The desire to posit an independent subjectivity suggests why Dinesen says little about her relationship with Denys Finch-Hatton. In fact, the little she presents of the relationship is purposefully cast in an idealized mold as she makes of that relationship one of coequals, based on the classical Greek model of homosexual liaisons. Their hunting experiences, for instances, become metaphors of idealized lovemaking. In the first lion-killing adventure Finch-Hatton lends her his rifle so she can participate actively in the action rather than remain a passive observer. Dinesen describes his gesture as "a declaration of love" and asks: "Should the rifle not then be of the biggest caliber?" The experience of shooting takes on the quality of orgasm: "I stood, panting, in the grass, aglow with the plenipotence that a shot gives you." In the second scene the man and woman meet the male and female lions alone in the moonlight. There, in a gesture of reckless courage ("risk[ing] our lives unnecessarily";), they enter "the centre of the dance," where two human beings face two animals, male and female together. Life, death, silence, darkness, pleasure, coalesce in a scene of unity: "We did not speak one word. In our hunt we had been a unity and we had nothing to say to one another." Precisely in this imaginative Africa, Dinesen finds the opportunity to contest the Old World arrangements between men and women, to refigure herself against the conventional cultural assignments of gender, and to celebrate a unification that collapses the binary opposition of male and female into silence and elides consciousness and animality.

Like Markham, Dinesen contests conventional gender assignments. Unlike Markham, however, Dinesen situates her empowerment in the recovery of female sensuality. In this text the female body is not the source of evil and contamination; female labor is not alienated but a source of pleasure; woman's body is not what Christine Froula calls "the symbol of patriarchal authority." "No longer divided and no longer inscribed with the designs of an external mastery," body and spirit commingle [Christine Froula, "When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the Canonical Economy," Critical Inquiry 10, December, 1983].

But, of course, this "life" is but a dream, for Dinesen's tale is ultimately the tale of loss. Once again domesticated in Denmark, Dinesen can only revisit in fierce nostalgia and lyrical imagination that "preexilic state of union" and that former dispensation, the reign of the goddess's daughter [see Bella Brodzki, "Mothers, Displacement, and Language in the Autobiographies of Nathalie Sarraute and Christa Wolf," in Life/Lines: Theorizing Women's Autobiography, edited by Brodzki and Celeste Schenck, 1988]. Now, this invocation of nostalgia leads me to ask of Dinesen …: Does her intervention in traditionally engendered autobiographical scripts imply an intervention in Western ideologies of race and the old arrangements between black and white?

On the one hand, Dinesen, as Susan Hardy Aiken argues, quarrels with the very ideologies of race that stabilized colonial regimes in early twentieth-century Kenya and does so through her narrative practices [see Aiken Isak Dinegen and the Engendering of Narrative, 1990]. For instance, she contests the old autobiographical arrangements sexualized in the androcentric ideology of the autonomous individual by deploying her speaking voice fluidly through the "I," the "you," and the "we," especially in the first pages of the text. Opening this way, she signals an alternative autobiographical practice, one that testifies to the ways in which her subjectivity emerges "out of Africa" and the Africans. She describes how the Africans name her "Lioness" Blixen, assigning to her the power identified with the "king" of the beasts. Making of her "a brass serpent," symbol to them of one who bears burdens, they elevate her above other Europeans. With this belief in her, she writes home, the natives effectively cast a "spell" on her, constituting her identity as Lucifer, light-giver, rebellious angel [Letters from Africa]. They also create her as storyteller by laying their stories before her. Moreover, the African environment intensifies existence, alchemically changing the mundane into the poetic, the mythic. Only here, she seems to suggest, can she bring to light the "dark continent" of her sexuality and the full resources of her hybridized subjectivity.

Recognizing the mutuality of identifications between herself and the native Africans, Dinesen in turn re-creates the mystery of Africa as mythic space, in turn elevates the Africans above the mundane by turning their stories and their land into poetry through a thick web of allusion and compelling prose. And she does so without making a spectacle out of them, without serving a voyeuristic reader. In fact, as Aiken elaborates, she undercuts any voyeurism on the part of narrator and reader by rendering "Africa" narratively unmasterable: "As with Africans, so with the book-as-Africa: no more than the colonists can we finally 'know its real nature' or subject it to hermeneutic mastery." It can never be contained in a Western gaze.

Other narrative practices in Out of Africa destabilize colonial gestures of power. Dinesen often directs the focus of her text away from herself to those people inhabiting what Lord Delamare and his fellow colonists would label the "margins" of the "civilized" world—to Kamante Gatura and Kinanjui. Surrounding them with majesty, mystery, and power, she ennobles rather than denigrates Africa and Africans for failing to meet the measures of Western practice, experience, and identity. Honoring the orality of African culture, she "speaks" in the sonorous storytelling voice that resonates with the elegant rhythms and tonal richness of Africa. As her letters indicate, she adopts from Farah Aden, her Somali house servant, the metaphor of life lived underwater. She takes her worldview from the Africans, discovering in their philosophical conjunction of good and evil a compatible orientation to the world and experience. Unwilling to make her narrative the totalizing whole of a unitary self, she joins together bits and pieces of African life, allowing Africa and herself to exist in fragmented, multiple forms, refusing the clear boundedness and certainty of the Western "I." She also multiplies the specificity of native Africans by differentiating the tribes and incorporating the diversity of peoples into her text. Implicitly rejecting European rationalism, she contests the denigrating embodiment of native and of woman by turning the ideology of sexual contamination on its head, ennobling the body—of the African, of woman. Celebrating African culture, she resists the colonizing tendency to stabilize, explain, judge, and hierarchize the other's differences, as if to recognize that to do other/wise would be to suppress the story of the great mother, to oppress the racial other, and ultimately to repress her own subjectivity.

Dinesen's keen consciousness of her own marginality as a woman who sought to "achieve something as myself" [Letters from Africa] and of the larger cultural politics of gender, and her consequent positioning of herself as an "outsider" in the British colony, encouraged her to embrace native African culture in more sympathetic ways than the British colonials who assumed their privileges and their cultural superiority unquestioningly. Unlike other European settlers, whose racism was reflected in such pronouncements as that of Lord Delamere that "the British race … was superior to heterogeneous African races only now emerging from centuries of relative barbarism" [quoted in Elspeth Huxley, White Man's Country: Lord Delamere and the Making of Kenya, 2 volumes, 1968], Dinesen expressed what other colonists at the time termed "pronative" sentiments, implemented "pronative" practices. And yet, Dinesen was herself one of the colonizers, a woman who participated in the appropriation of native land, who hoped to profit from native labor, who enjoyed native service and idolization. Thus other of her narrative practices collude in the exploitative agenda of colonialism. The recurrent possessive ("my farm," "my boys"), the generalizations about native tribes, position her as a "European" speaker and reinscribe colonial relationships. By embedding native Africans rhetorically in an intricate web of literary allusions, she textually contains Africans and Africa in Western discursive nets of meaning and reference. Beyond these rhetorical gestures, however, lies a more complex ambiguous colonial practice. Dinesen's nostalgia works to constitute "Africa" as a romanticized territory, inhabited by romanticized "natives" and "animals." "Africa" functions therefore as a kind of "Afro-disiac." The distanced setting ("I had a farm …"), the achronological rather than linear time, the elegance and distance of the narrative voice, the "artifice" of a text that constantly insists, through its dazzling display of metaphor, on its imaginative status, all aid and abet Dinesen's romanticism. Certainly it is a different kind of romanticism from Markham's cavalier and stoic brand, but it is a brand nonetheless. And so, without dismissing the very real practices of subversion in the text, I want to pursue certain problematic implications of Dinesen's autobiographical practices.

Since the native Africans name her with the natural aristocratic title of "Lioness Blixen" as replacement for the derived nobility of "Baroness Blixen," Dinesen in turn must maintain their nobility as essential to her own by resisting the conventional racial stereotypes of the white settlers. Thus she privileges a certain alignment of African "difference." Dinesen assigns imagination, bondedness with nature, elegance of style, and sensuality to the native Africans as she pursues her conspiracy of nobility in the face of bourgeois philistinism. She thereby distances native Africans and herself from the repressive, prosaic, paternalistic culture of the white settlers and situates herself as romantic outsider whose bravado and rebellious excess are evident in her identificatory gesture, "I am a Hottentot," a gesture she directs defiantly at white passengers on a ship returning to Africa, not at black Africans. Dinesen invokes the politics of race to engage in her own class resistance because it is within bourgeois institutions that she experiences imaginative, economic, and sexual oppression. But as class disidentification encourages her to align difference along a certain axis, it also leads her to participate in a mystifying essentialism.

Dinesen's positioning of the body in the text reveals the potentially conservative effects of mystification in the midst of colonialism. Pressing the patriarchal myth of Christianity in the crucible of her African experience, Dinesen locates the source of female oppression in male mastery of the female body and promotes the recovery of that body as the beginning of a liberated female subjectivity. Doing so, she celebrates the body and its pleasures, the romanticized identification of woman with nature and the maternal body. Thus when Dinesen identifies herself as a "Hottentot," she invokes a body politics that "extolls" the "shadowy, nocturnal, oneiric domain" of the great goddess as "the interior locus of mystery and creativity" [Domna C. Stanton, "Difference on Trial: A Critique of the Maternal Metaphor in Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva," in The Thinking Muse: Feminism and Modern Philosophy, edited by Jeffner Allen and Iris Marion Young, 1989]. This return to the body through maternal metaphorization becomes what Domna C. Stanton calls "a heuristic tool for reworking images and meanings" ["Difference on Trial"]. A strategy of subversion, it works to "countervalorize the traditional antithesis that identifies man with culture and confines woman to instinctual nature" to the primitive and childlike. But the problem is that, in pursuing this "enabling mythology" as "a negation/subversion of paternal hierarchies" ["Difference on Trial"]. Dinesen takes the Africans with her into the textual forest. The African is once again allied with the natural world, nativistic alliance already deployed in the justificatory discourses of racism and colonialism. Thus, in the historically specific context of early twentieth-century colonialism, the assignment of animal names to native Africans as part of her mythography operates racially, not just mythically. It is one thing for a white woman to be positioned metaphorically in the "black continent" of her sexuality and for her to identify herself and other white settlers with animals. It is quite another for the black Africans, no matter how regal and untamed the animals with which they are identified, to be positioned metaphorically where they are already positioned literally and discursively. The material realities of racial politics disrupt the largess of metaphorical politics.

Furthermore, any utopian myth of unification, even if an admittedly failed one, is problematic. In Denmark the exiled Dinesen crafts her imaginative return to Africa as a return to an empowering origin, "the maternal continent," and the effect of that return is the mythification of the mother, the figure Luce Irigaray has called "the dark continent of the dark continent" [Luce Irigaray, Corps à corps avec la mere, 1981]. But mythification of a paradigm of maternal origins, warns Bella Brodzki, even as it contests hegemonic myths, potentially betrays the same "inherent dangers of privileging principles" as patriarchal mythification ["Mothers, Displacement and Language"]. There are many motherhoods, not just one reified "motherhood." Mythification, however, wears everything to a patined homogeneity; it universalizes. Dinesen's dream of imaginary at-oneness requires the erasure of multiple and calibrated differences among and between people, races, and classes, between women, between mothers. Thus the textual identification of the narrator and the Somali women, while acknowledging certain realities of female oppression, glosses such complex material realities as their doubled colonization.

She also takes the native Africans into an oneiric realm that, however effectively it disperses coherent and totalizing interpretive possibilities, distances the Africans from history itself. Such "nativism," as Edward Said cautions, "reinforces the distinction [between colonizer and colonized] by revaluating the weaker or subservient partner. And it has often led to compelling but often demagogic assertions about a native past, history, or actuality that seems to stand free not only of the colonizer but of worldly time itself" [Edward W. Said, "Yeats and Decolonization," in Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, 1990]. There was such a past, certainly, but that past was past long before Dinesen journeyed to Africa. While Said cautions specifically against the excesses of nativist nationalism, his admonition captures my own concern about Dinesen's passionate countervalorization of native culture, which seems to abandon specific countervalorization of native culture, which seems to abandon specific histories in favor of oneiric and aestheticized myth.

Moreover, her powerful evocation of the sense of loss and dispossession that supports her ethics of self-dispersal seems to suggest that only by losing does one gain, an ethics of love as letting go elaborated by Aiken [in Isak Dinesen]. Yet this reverence for loss and dispersal leads the narrator to position the native Africans in an irrecoverable past, to identify them with an inevitable loss, to ennoble them certainly but also to contain them. Distilling native Africans through specific axes of identification, she locates them in an exoticized and timeless place, in a nostalgically crystallized past, even as she acknowledges the historical changes being wrought on the land and on native culture through the historical march of colonialism. Positioned in such spaces, they function as passive subjects of history's corrupt and corrupting march into the future. Thus they are positioned as victims of history, not as active agents within vibrant, ongoing, complex histories.

Dinesen's fictive "Africa" becomes an imaginative map on which we see projected a white woman's desire for an irrecoverable past of empowered subjectivity. Mapping can be disruptive; it can be complicit. It is not innocent, as Dinesen herself understood. The romanticized cartography of "Africa distilled" in an expression of an "artistic primitivism" that in its reification of the other reveals certain totalizing investments in an imperialist autobiographical practice. Against what might have been her own best intentions, and certainly in tension with very real and sophisticated contestatory practices, Dinesen's "I" participates in the "imaginative opportunism" that characterizes all manner of imperial projects.

In an essay titled "Changing the Subject" [in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, edited by Teresa de Lauretis, 1982], Nancy K. Miller elaborates a central strand of current feminist practice: "The formula 'the personal is the political' requires a redefinition of the personal to include most immediately an interrogation of ethnocentrism; a poetics of identity that engages with the 'other woman.'" Gayatri Spivak, in "French Feminism in an International Frame" [in In Other Words: Essays in Cultural Politics, 1987], argues too for "a simultaneous other focus: not merely who am I? but who is the other woman? How am I naming her? How does she name me?"

The concern for the "other woman" that now weaves throughout feminist theory in the West derives from a profound rethinking of a hypostasized sexual difference, a homogenized "woman." It is a rethinking that problematizes with postmodernism generally the Western notion of a sovereign "self," but also a rethinking insists that historical specificities are the "grounds" outside the text that position us complexly and relationally in consciousness, behavioral practices, and politics. The shift derives also from a rethinking that rejects any simplistic or romanticized notion of "marginality," recognizing instead that positions of marginalities and centralities are nomadic, that each of us, multiply positioned in discursive fields, inhabits margins and centers. Thus the call for reading the other woman requires that we consider the multiplicity of differences between one woman and another, the multiplicity of differences within each of us. It is an acknowledgment that the other woman troubles Western theories. It is a recognition that the other woman also troubles generic rules that function to govern and discipline identifications, and that she forces us to remap the ideology of identity and the horizons of subjectivity within autobiographical texts.