Gide – Gidé, André. – Voyage au Congo. Carnets de route.

An outstanding binding by one of France’s master-binders Marot-Rodde, in perfect condition. – One of 1363 numberd copies. – In 1925, André Gide and Marc Allégret embarked on a ten-month journey to French West Africa. However, what was initially intended as a “pleasure trip” quickly turned into a political issue: the further the authors traveled, the more they became aware of the exploitation and oppression of the local population. But does this mean that the media produced during this trip, including numerous photographs and a film, are anti-colonialist? Following well-known theorems of hybridity research, this work shows that the travel media are neither exclusively racist nor consistently “neutral” contemporary reports, but that it is precisely the oscillation between Eurocentric and alt-artistic modes of perception, between fictional and factual discourses, that makes the texts so fascinating. For the first time, the entire corpus of travel literature is examined and subjected to a comparative analysis with regard to the perception and representation of the Other.