Phantom Africa

One of the towering classics of twentieth century French literature Phantom Africa is a singular and ultimately unclassifiable work a book composed of one mans compulsive and constantly mutating daily travel journalby turns melodramatic selfdeprecating ecstatic and moroseas well as an exhaustively detailed account of the first French statesponsored anthropological expedition to visit subSaharan Africa. In 1930 Michel Leiris was an aspiring poet drifting away from the orbit of the Surrealist movement in Paris when the anthropologist Marcel Griaule invited him to serve as the secretaryarchivist for the Mission DakarDjibouti a major collecting and ethnographic journey that traversed the African continent between May 1931 and February 1933. Leiris while maintaining the official records of the Mission documenting the teams acquisitions and participating in the research also kept a diary where he noted not only a given days activities and events but also his impressions his states of mind his anxieties his dreams and even his erotic fantasies. Upon returning to France rather than compiling a more conventional report or ethnographic study Leiris decided simply to publish his diary almost entirely untouched aside from minor corrections and a smattering of footnotes. The result is an extraordinary book a daybyday record of one European writers experiences in an Africa inexorably shaded by his own exotic delusions and expectations on the one hand and an unparalleled depiction of the paradoxes and hypocrisies of conducting anthropological field research at the height of the colonial era on the other. Never before available in English translation Phantom Africa is an invaluable document. If the book is a stone marking a bend on a path that is entirely personal as Leiris himself described it years later it is also a book whose broad canvas bears witness to the full range of social and political forces reshaping the African continent in the period between the World Wars.