Textual Traffic

Paying particular attention to representations of Africa and India, Shankar tracks the historical contours of a colonial modernity in a wide variety of travel narratives--African-American and postcolonial, canonical and filmic--drawn from different periods of the twentieth century. Included are explorations of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men, Richard Wright's Black Power, V. S. Naipaul's India trilogy, and Stephen Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.