PHANTOM AFRICA, translated by Brent Hayes Edwards

711pp., illus., paperback, First English Language Edition, Calcutta, 2019

First published in French in 1934 as L'Afrique Fantôme.

The diary that French poet, writer and ethnologist, Michel Leiris kept from May 1931 to February 1933, when he was the secretary-archivist for the Dakar-Djibouti Mission, an ethnographic expedition to collect objects for the collection of the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro.

Michel Leiris (1901–90) is best known for his autobiography La règle du jeu,

Brent Hayes Edwards is Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His books include The Practice of Diaspora: literature, translation, and the rise of black internationalism and Epistrophies: jazz and the literary imagination.