Trans-Saharan Worlds and World Views in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko

Aphra Behn's Coramantien has long been considered more Orientalized than African. But in this essay, I reassess the sub-Saharan setting of Oroonoko (1688) in the context of early modern geographical writing about Africa. Not simply a projection of colonial fantasies, the British image of Africa during this time had a foundation in the long history of the trans-Sahara trade, in Arabic texts, and in the discourse that sub-Saharan merchants and guides used to describe their homelands. Building on scholarship demonstrating that Behn was interested in the early study of geography, I argue that Oroonoko dramatizes geographical representation as a palimpsest of textual and oral details, and that the novel interrogates whether isolating the material and the measurable from the discursive and the ideational is a viable epistemological strategy. In doing so, Oroonoko shows that European world views were shaped from the outside in, which enables us to read the novel itself as a text underwritten by the stories that Arab North Africans and sub-Saharan Africans told about their worlds.