ABSTRACT
How do we imagine our African origins? What is the constellation of images, emotions, and ideas that we attribute to our African evolutionary heritage? As this chapter attests, the stereotypical images of the African continent circulating within and outside of museums are not merely visual; they are a dense package of ideas, folklore, ideology, and politics that thrive in cultural memory and our collective imagination.1 By excavating a long genealogy of mythological, religious, and political infl uences, we can see how “African origins” has come to encompass a complicated array of iconographies that fi x Africa and African people in the deep, evolutionary past.
