Narrative
Ashantee
Peter Altenberg · 1897
Synopsis
Sketches born of a reconstructed Ashanti village in the Prater, in Vienna, where men, women and children from Africa live before the eyes of visitors. The narrator goes there every day, learns words of their language, eats with them and grows attached to some of them, and reports what they all say, exposed as spectators.
Context
From 10 July to 29 October 1896, a private zoological garden in the Prater showed Viennese audiences Ashanti living in huts built for them; the city crowded in, and people spoke of an Ashanti fever. The volume appeared the following year from S. Fischer in Berlin. Its author, a daily visitor, publicly questions the legitimacy of the exhibition in it. Recent criticism also reads, beneath this defence, exotic and erotic fantasies that belong to the very gaze he denounces.
Who it is for
A volume of very short texts, which can be read in any order. Today's reader should know that the book's vocabulary is that of 1897, and that it jars.
Prizes and reception
Its author's second book, and one of the few literary texts of its time to challenge a human exhibition.
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