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Fears of monstrous difference are echoed by scholars such as literary and cultural theorist Marianne Torgovnick and feminist bell hooks who, in seeking to unpack Western fascination with the ‘primitive other’, identify dichotomous representations of racialised subjects in binary terms such as ‘noble savages’ – ‘violent cannibals’. Much like critical analysis of racialised representation, critical disability scholarship interrogates the construction of notions such as ‘normalcy’ and the disturbance or sense of dis-ease that disability creates in those who consider themselves ‘normal.’ The encounter with primitive other will be examined by comparing and contrasting the experiences of two white Westerners in Africa, as chronicled in their travel adventure narratives: Swiss German Corinne Hofmann’s story of her life in Kenya (The White Masai: My Exotic Tale of Love and Adventure, 1998, 2005); and deafened American Josh Swiller’s story as a Peace Corps volunteer in Zambia (The Unheard, 2007). While ‘monstrous’ subjects, such as those marked as different due to disability, may be better equipped to tolerate fear of difference in other, neither the able-bodied nor the disabled are immune to the monstrousness inherent in the cultural imaginary. In response to the terrorizing force of a status quo that demands fixed identity and sameness, both able-bodied Hofmann and deafened Swiller abandoned their Western homes for racialised encounters in post-colonial Africa. An examination of the authors’ attraction/repulsion responses to African sexual and cultural taboos, and issues of gender, power and violence, helps to elucidate how the commodification of otherness is perpetuated through the mediums of Western commodity and mass culture such as popular fiction. Self is linked to other and these encounters are shown to be both transformative and conflicted for the foreigners and their adopted communities.
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