Pan-African Geographies in Motion: THE TROPICAL PERFORMANCES OF MAYA ANGELOU AND JOSEPHINE BAKER

René Ménil maintained that there is an exoticism founded in nature that results from a human relation in a foreign land that could lead to disorientation, particularly when observing people in their environment. This is the very relation the European colonizer had with the colonial subject whom s/he rendered exotic.¹ Undeniably, the tropics have always been correlated with the bodies populating these equatorial regions, and since Western scholarship developed notions of the tropics as being full of hazardous natural disasters, terrible diseases, and venomous animals, its inhabitants were similarly aligned. These long-standing beliefs rendered non-Western peoples of tropical regions as