ABSTRACT
Farmer’s connection with pop cult predecessors is especially noticeable in her references to slavery and cannibalism as practiced in modern times. In
The Ear . . . , she depicts slave-trading as an ongoing activity in the year 2194 in an imagined African nation (307). In A Girl Named Disaster, she uses her young protagonist to comment upon modern Mozambique as the possible home of cannibals. One must wonder how this eleven-year-old acquired such an outlandish fear of her neighbors. While cannibalism has been a stock ingredient in Western pulp fi ction, this child character has had little contact with the West. Such irrational tale-telling, however, is not new, and Chiwome makes the point that imperial responses to Africa-that is, “Dark Continent” and “noble savage” myth-making-”tell us more about European mythology and ethnocentrism than about the African culture” (vi). Similarly Ella Shohat and Robert Stam comment, “the West organizes knowledge in ways fl attering to the Eurocentric imagination” (14).
