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Cover; Title page; Copyright page; Contents; Acknowledgements; 1. Introduction; Producing Certain Spaces; Literature on and about Namibia; Literature List; Terms and Conditions; Looking Forward; 2. Social and Literary Space; From Relative to Social Space; The Social Space of Henri Lefebvre; Social Space and Literary Space; 3. The Colonial Era: War, Toil, and Diamonds; Introduction to the Texts; Emptied Landscapes; The Garden; The White Female Colonialist; 4. The Apartheid Era: The Trust in Maps and Guns; Introduction to the Texts; Emptied Landscapes (?) Modern-day Namibian history has largely been shaped by three major eras: German colonial rule, South African apartheid occupation, and the Liberation Struggle. It was, however, not only military conquest that laid the cornerstone for the colony, but also how the colony was imagined, the "dream" of this colony. As a tool of discursive worldmaking, literature has played a major role in providing a framework in which to "dream" Namibia, first from outside its borders, and then from within. In Fictioning Namibia as a Space of Desire, Renzo Baas employs Henri Lefebvre's city-countryside dialectic and reworks it in order to uncover how fictional texts played an integral part in the violent acquisition of a foreign territory. Through the production of myths around whiteness, German and South African authors designed a literary space in which control, destruction, and the dehumanisation of African peoples are understood as a natural order, one that is dictated by history and its linear continuation. These European texts are offset by Namibia's first novel by an African, offering a counter-narrative to the colonial invention that was (German) South West Africa Technologies of Conquest and Domination(De)Constructing the White Male Explorer; 5. The Namibian Moment: Learning to Sing; Introduction to the Text; Main Spaces of the Narrative; Resistance and Disobedience; The Resistance of One, the Resistance of Many; Merging the Past, Present, and Future; 6. Conclusion; Producing the 'Other' (and oneself); A Colonial Network of Spaces and Strategies; The Metropole in Crisis; A Root of the Metropolitan Crisis; Monologic and Dialogic Narratives; Bibliography; Index; Back cover
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