caa a22 4500 388044551 CHVBK 20180307125032.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e199812 xx s 000 0 eng 10.2307/525359 doi S0002020600034077 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.2307/525359 Pels Peter The Magic of Africa: Reflections on a Western Commonplace [Elektronische Daten] [Peter Pels] This paper suggests that a genealogy of European conceptions of African magic still needs to be written. It focuses on a specific Western commonplace, one that pictures Africa as the dark heardand of magic and witchcraft while at the same time saying that this occult core is difficult or dangerous to write about. The analysis of a number of different texts in which this commonplace emerges suggests that this recurrent fear of an African occult core is part of the Western engagement with the occult in Africa through its translation as "witchcraft.” The translation of African magic as "witchcraft” threatens European understandings of self and other just as much as this translation is an attempt to contain the African occult within imperial, colonial, or neocolonial discourses. These different attempts to write about the occult in Africa suggest that this threat of translation cannot be contained; a recent text even suggests that it extends itself to unsetding our sensory perception of the world around us. The magic of Africa requires a still more radical engagement than Africanist anthropology has produced thus far. Copyright © African Studies Association 1998 African Studies Review Cambridge University Press 41/3(1998-12), 193-209 0002-0206 41:3<193 1998 41 ASR https://doi.org/10.2307/525359 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.2307/525359 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Pels Peter NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- African Studies Review Cambridge University Press 41/3(1998-12), 193-209 0002-0206 41:3<193 1998 41 ASR CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge