During the so-called “era decolonization” in Africa, few historical events held more salience than what is most commonly known as the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya (which covered the period from 1952 to 1960). This article examines not only how tropes about the nature and origins of Mau Mau were and are deployed across different semiotic landscapes, but also the ways in which their operations are made manifest through practices of reading. I argue that we should consider the idea of Mau Mau—whether it be central to a text or present a mere detail—as a catalyst through which broader claims are made, especially as they relate to the nature of history and the semiotic dimensions of the events that populate it. This article shows this through conducting a “tropology” of Mau Mau, in which the suffix -ology underscores reading its tropes as a particular mode of studying it.

中文翻译：

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《读茅茅》

在非洲所谓的“非殖民化时代”期间，几乎没有什么历史事件比最广为人知的肯尼亚茂茂起义（涵盖 1952 年至 1960 年期间）更为突出。本文不仅考察了关于茂茂的性质和起源的比喻是如何在不同的符号景观中部署的，而且还考察了通过阅读实践使它们的运作变得明显的方式。我认为我们应该将茂茂的想法——无论它是文本的中心还是仅仅呈现一个细节——视为一种催化剂，通过它可以提出更广泛的主张，尤其是当它们与历史的本质和历史的符号学维度相关时填充它的事件。本文通过对 Mau Mau 进行“转义”来说明这一点，其中后缀 -学强调阅读它的比喻是一种特殊的研究方式。