6
On 9 January 1830, in the snowy wastes of the Canadian Arctic, a British exploratory expedition met a group of Inuit who had never encountered Europeans before. Unlike some first encounters between cultures, this meeting seems to have been entirely amicable. Gifts were exchanged, and when a British officer and one of the Inuit took part in a friendly running race, they did so ‘with so much and such equal politeness on both sides that there was no victor to be declared’ (Ross 1835: 247). The British also offered the Inuit some of the tinned food they had brought with them, but this exchange was less successful:
They did not relish our preserved meat: but one who ate a morsel seemed to do it as a matter of obedience, saying it was very good, but admitting, on being cross questioned by Commander Ross, that he had said what was not true; on which all the rest, on receiving permission, threw away what they had received.
(Ross 1835: 246)
More to the Inuits’ taste, however, was the seal oil which the British were using as a lubricant, and as a fuel in lamps. As the subsequent British account of the expedition recorded, when ‘the same man [was] offered some oil’, he ‘drank it with much satisfaction, admitting, that it was really good’.
In itself, this reference to the contrasting diets of the British and Inuit may seem amusing but inconsequential. Yet it has perhaps a deeper and ultimately more troubling resonance. Food often serves as a powerful signifier both of cultural self-definition and of cultural difference. And when the description above is situated within the larger account from which it is drawn, John Ross’s Narrative of a Second Voyage in Search of a North West Passage (1835), it becomes apparent that the issue of diet indeed functions in this way, as a marker of some significant cultural differences between the British and the Inuit. Strange as it may seem today, the British at this date were immensely proud of their tinned food (see Thompson, 2004). First patented in 1812, and not yet mass-produced, the tin can was a comparatively new technology, which seemed to represent a remarkable advance in food preservation. It also played a vital role in enabling the exploratory activity undertaken by the British Navy in the Arctic in the early nineteenth century. The expeditions undertaken by figures like John Ross and William Parry in this period often lasted for several years, and on voyages of this length scurvy was always a threat, due to the difficulty of maintaining a supply of fresh food. Tinned foodstuffs, however, retained their nutritional value to a greater extent than salted meat and other forms of preserved food, and so provided a better safeguard against disease.
In this context, it is unsurprising that Ross makes several admiring references to tinned food over the course of his narrative. On one occasion, indeed, he waxes lyrical on the topic, wondering what foodstuffs might have survived from Rome and Ancient Egypt if the tin can had been invented earlier, and suggesting whimsically that perhaps it will be possible, ‘some thousand years hence’, to dine on ‘hare soup[, … ] purée of carrots’, and other dishes ‘cooked in London during the reign of George the Fourth’ (1835: 619–20). Here and elsewhere, Ross seems to regard the tin can as emblematic of British technological and organisational prowess in general. A triumph of human ingenuity over natural processes of decay, to Ross it represents metonymically both the attributes that had made Britain the dominant world power at this date, and the benefits that the British liked to think they were bringing to the wider world – namely, ‘progress’ or, in early nineteenth-century parlance, ‘improvement’.
This symbolic investment in the tin can gives a deeper resonance to the episode recounted earlier, in which the Inuit are unable to appreciate the miracle of tinned meat. This in turn contributes to a larger portrait of the Inuit, as developed over the course of Ross’s narrative, which defines them very much in terms of what and how they eat. Again and again, Ross and the other contributors to his volume choose to emphasise, in a mixture of bemusement and horror, the Inuit predilection for raw seal meat, the apparently filthy conditions in which they prepare and eat their food, and their extreme gluttony. The prodigious quantities consumed at one Inuit feast, for example, prompt the following exclamation from James Clarke Ross, John Ross’s nephew:
Disgusting brutes! The very hyena would have filled its belly and gone to sleep: nothing but absolute incapacity to push their food beyond the top of the throat could check the gourmandizing of these specimens of reason and humanity.
(Ross 1835: 358)
This is not the only moment in which the younger Ross uses disturbingly bestial imagery in relation to the Inuit and their eating habits; elsewhere, he compares them variously to pigs, vultures and tigers.
In depicting the Inuit in this way, John Ross and his nephew were engaged in a process that is now sometimes called ‘othering’. This is a much-used term in recent travel writing studies, although confusingly it is often used in two slightly different senses. In a weaker, more general sense, ‘othering’ simply denotes the process by which the members of one culture identify and highlight the differences between themselves and the members of another culture. In a stronger sense, however, it has come to refer more specifically to the processes and strategies by which one culture depicts another culture as not only different but also inferior to itself. All travel writing must, arguably, engage in an act of othering in the first sense, since every travel account is premised on the assumption that it brings news of people and places that are to some degree unfamiliar and ‘other’ to the audience. More debatable, however, is whether all travel writing inevitably ‘others’ other cultures in the second, stronger sense of the term. Yet it is certainly in this spirit that Ross’s narrative focuses so frequently on the issue of diet. For this is a topic which enables the account to posit a seemingly clear distinction between, on the one hand, the British, the representatives of supposed ‘civilisation’ and, on the other, the Inuit, who are thus made to seem ‘savage’ and uncivilised, for all that they may be friendly and good-natured. In this way, Ross’s account produces an image of the Other which licenses a sense of cultural superiority in both traveller and audience, and many other travelogues historically have worked in the same fashion, thereby helping to generate or reinforce a range of prejudicial, ethnocentric attitudes.
The motives behind such pejorative or patronising portrayals of other cultures may be various; often these motives will be unconscious and over-determined, springing from a complex mixture of emotions, such as fear, envy, revulsion, incomprehension and sometimes even desire, when another culture stirs taboo fantasies that travellers wish to repress and disown. Very often, however, instances of pejorative ‘othering’ in travel writing serve an important justificatory function. They may legitimate the traveller’s personal conduct towards the people he or she met; more crucially, perhaps, they also often work to legitimate the conduct of the traveller’s culture. The traveller’s portrayal of another people or place is often in this way ideologically motivated, seeking at some level to justify and encourage a particular policy or course of action towards those others. John Ross’s depiction of the Inuit, for example, seems to have possessed such an ideological dimension. In the early nineteenth century, British explorers in the Arctic were not only searching for a North West Passage that would enable ships to sail from the North Atlantic to the North Pacific, they were also scouting out the natural resources of the region. Yet these resources were arguably the property of the Inuit, the indigenous population. By painting the Inuit as savages, however, Ross’s narrative functions as a subtle endorsement of the British presence in the region. Like most explorers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Ross takes it for granted that the earth and its resources exist to be harvested by man. Viewed through this ideological lens, however, the Arctic clearly cannot be left to its indigenous population, the Inuit. Portrayed by Ross as primitive, improvident, and in thrall to their most base appetites, the Inuit are seemingly in no position to develop the Arctic properly, or to maximise its productive potential. It falls, therefore, to the British to assume the stewardship of the Arctic, since it is only the British, apparently, who have the foresight, self-discipline and technological expertise required to administer the region properly, in ways that will benefit both themselves and the local population. Or so, at least, we are meant to surmise from Ross’s narrative.
The ideological dimensions of travel writing, and the larger rhetorical purposes served by the frequent tendency of travel writers to depict other groups and cultures in a hostile or condescending way, are topics that have been much addressed in the recent wave of travel writing studies. In particular, these are issues which have greatly concerned postcolonialist scholars, who have focused their attention especially on the depictions of other people and places offered in Western travel writing, and in Western culture more generally. Leading the way in this regard was Edward Said’s seminal Orientalism (1978), a foundational text for both postcolonial and travel writing studies. In Orientalism, Said explored Western images and accounts, from ancient times down to the late twentieth century, of the so-called ‘Orient’: that is, the region stretching from Egypt and the Middle East to India, China and Japan. He detected in many of these representations of the ‘Orient’, regardless of whether they occurred in art and fiction or in ostensibly factual, objective genres such as travel writing and ethnography, essentially the same underlying repertoire of stereotypes and unquestioned assumptions. Thus Orientals were routinely depicted as sensual and cruel, whilst Oriental societies were usually assumed to have a natural tendency towards despotism. These recurrent motifs, Said suggested, were not necessarily an accurate description of the objective reality of the highly diverse cultures and ethnicities of Asia and the Middle East; rather, they were a set of representational conventions which had become pervasive and as it were institutionalised in European and North American culture. In this way, these motifs and images came to constitute a discourse, a concept Said derived from the French theorist Michel Foucault. Glossed by Said as a ‘regularising collectivity’ (1983: 186), the term ‘discourse’ denotes an accumulated archive of knowledge and imagery which comes to shape a culture’s attitudes and assumptions on a given topic, and which accordingly dictates what is likely to be regarded as true, and as proper knowledge, in that subject area. ‘Orientalism’ is thus, for Said, a discourse in Western culture which has consistently worked to construct a singular ‘Orient’ as the antithesis of a supposedly more enlightened West. And this simplistic, negative ‘othering’ of Asia and the Middle East, Said further suggests, has generally served ideological ends, and has often been used to justify the West’s colonial ambitions in these regions.
In the wake of Orientalism, numerous critics and cultural historians have investigated the rhetorical conventions and ideological agendas underpinning Western accounts of other regions of the world, and other cultures and races. In this spirit, for example, Christopher Miller (1985), V.Y. Mudimbe (1988), Tim Youngs (1994) and others have explored the discursive construction of Africa in the West, and the practices and policies that have flowed from an ‘Africanist’, as opposed to ‘Orientalist’, tradition or discourse. Ronald Inden (1990), Sara Suleri (1992) and others, meanwhile, have addressed similar issues in relation to India, whilst Terry Goldie (1989) and others have explored European and North American attitudes to supposedly ‘savage’, hunter-gatherer cultures. Few of these studies, it should be stressed, focus exclusively on travel writing. However, the genre often features prominently in postcolonialist enquiries of this sort. For it is usually travellers who bring back the first reports of other cultures, and so first formulate the grounds, and the key markers, by which those cultures are understood to be different to their own society. In addition, since travelogues necessarily depict moments of cross-cultural contact, they are often highly revealing of the so-called ‘imaginative geographies’ that operate not only in the individual traveller’s mind, but also in his or her culture more generally. Thus travel accounts often illuminate the mental maps that individuals and cultures have of the world and its inhabitants, and the larger matrix of prejudices, fantasies and assumptions that they bring to bear on any encounter with, or description of, the Other.
The present chapter views travel writing through what is broadly speaking a postcolonialist lens, and explores some of the ways in which the genre has both contributed to, and also occasionally contested, Western imperialism. To this end, the first section considers the various ways, some subtle, some decidedly unsubtle, in which travel writing has functioned as a mode of what is sometimes dubbed colonial discourse (see Spurr 1993). Here I shall explore the rhetorical strategies, and the representations of the Other, typically offered by travel writing when it is in the service of empire; and it should be noted that these representations and rhetorical strategies are also characteristic of colonial discourse more generally, and so may be found in other genres besides travel writing, such as fiction, journalism and visual art, whenever those genres are informed by imperialist attitudes and ideologies. The second section then explores the extent to which modern travel writing keeps alive these imperialist traditions, and continues to deploy tropes and representational strategies associated with colonial discourse, even after the apparent end of European imperialism. That is to say, it examines travel writing’s complicity with what is often termed neo-colonialism, by which is meant the networks of knowledge, power and representation that currently sustain the West’s ongoing political and economic dominance over the rest of the world. This is not to suggest, however, that all Western travel writing is inherently or invariably imperialist and exploitative. As the first section of the chapter will show, there are important qualifications to be made to any blanket condemnation of the genre on these grounds. And as the third and final section will discuss, recent years have also seen a wave of ‘postcolonial’ travelogues, in which writers seek to reclaim and reorientate a genre long associated with imperialist and colonialist attitudes.
Strategies of Othering I: Travel Writing and Colonial Discourse
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are often dubbed the age of ‘high imperialism’. It was in this period that Britain, France and the other European powers greatly extended their influence around the world, with the result that by 1914 they effectively controlled some 85% of the globe (Said 1993: 6). During the same period, moreover, the USA, an offshoot of European imperialism, consolidated its control over the North American landmass between Mexico and the 49th parallel, added Alaska and Hawaii to the Union, in 1867 and 1898 respectively, and acquired further overseas territories in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam and Samoa. Many Americans, of course, did not regard their nation’s growth as a form of imperialism, although it certainly felt that way to some of the indigenous populations absorbed into the republic. But in Europe, this was a time when many espoused an unabashed imperialism, seeing it as the natural order of things that white peoples of European extraction should govern vast tracts of the globe. Such hubristic, ethnocentric assumptions produced, and were simultaneously a product of, a pervasive imagery and ideology of empire, that found expression at many levels in European society, and in a variety of cultural forms.
Travel writing was one such cultural form steeped in imperialist attitudes and imagery. A text that illustrates this aspect of the genre in an especially stark and extreme fashion, and that accordingly exemplifies many of the characteristic tropes and conventions of colonial discourse more generally, is Henry Morton Stanley’s bestselling Through the Dark Continent (1878). The book is an account of an arduous, three-year trek across central Africa in which Stanley led a party of some 350 porters and guides from Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean to Lakes Victoria and Tanganyika in East Africa, before following the course of the Lualaba and Congo rivers to reach Africa’s Atlantic coast. This was not an expedition of imperial conquest; on this mission at least, Stanley himself added no new territory to any of the European empires. Rather, he travelled principally as an explorer, seeking to gather geographical and ethnographical information. Fed back into the circuits of Western knowledge, however, the data he collected would in due course prove immensely useful to European colonial projects in eastern and central Africa. In addition to providing practical assistance in this way, moreover, Through the Dark Continent would also prove useful ideologically, by painting a picture of Africa and its inhabitants that seemed to encourage and justify the imperialist enterprise.
Stanley’s narrative functions as a form of colonial discourse in a variety of ways. In the first place, his account of Africa, like John Ross’s account of the Arctic, is from one perspective an investigation into the natural resources, and the lucrative opportunities for trade, that exist in the region. He reports on ‘valuable article[s] of commerce’ (1988: vol. 1, 301) such as beeswax and india-rubber whenever he finds them, and rhapsodises about areas in which the land seems especially fertile, and so amenable to agricultural development. Elsewhere, Stanley also fantasises about a ‘great trading port’ on Lake Victoria, a place where steamships may collect ‘the coffee of Uzongora, the ivory, sheep, and goats of Ugeyeya, Usoga, Uvuma, and Uganda’, and many other commodities besides, in exchange for ‘fabrics brought from the coast’ (1988: vol. 2, 175). This last rhapsody occurs in the course of the ‘monarch-of-all-I-survey’ scene discussed in the last chapter, and in the present context it is worth remembering that when he fashions such scenes, Stanley seems to take imaginative possession of the landscapes in front of him, and encourages the reader to indulge in similarly acquisitive fantasies. And in this way Through the Dark Continent, like many accounts of exploration, at one level works simply to whet the appetites of traders and investors in Europe, suggesting numerous possibilities for profit and self-advancement in distant territories.
Commercial ventures, of course, do not necessarily entail empire and colonialism. Nor does Stanley himself explicitly advocate any form of imperial or colonial arrangement in the region. At the same time, however, the account he provides of Africa makes implicitly a powerful case for some sort of administration by an external power. Like John Ross in the Arctic, but in a far more lurid fashion, Stanley emphasises the primitive state, and the savagery and barbarism, of the majority of the cultures he encounters in Africa. The narrative’s most memorable passages, for example, are undoubtedly those that recount the pitched battles that Stanley and his men fought with local tribespeople whilst navigating the Lualaba and Congo rivers. Again and again, he declares himself baffled by ‘the senseless hate and ferocity which appeared to animate these primitive aborigines’ (1988: vol. 2, 193), although native suspicion of a large, well-armed band of strangers, in a region still terrorised by Arab slave traders, was surely far from inexplicable. In describing these clashes, moreover, Stanley utilises literary techniques acquired during his earlier career as a journalist. His account is written mostly in the past tense, but at moments of high drama it slips into the present tense to offer a vivid recreation of events. In the following vignette, for example, Stanley and his men, travelling by boat, have rounded a bend in the Congo only to encounter a flotilla of native boats, headed by a ‘monster canoe’ carrying more than a hundred warriors:
As the foremost canoe comes rushing down, and its consorts on either side beating the water into foam, and raising their jets of water with their sharp prows, I turn to take a last look at our people, and say to them:-
‘Boys, be firm as iron; wait till you see the first spear, and then take aim. Don’t fire all at once. Keep aiming until you are sure of your man. Don’t think of running away, for only your guns can save you.’
Frank is with the Ocean on the right flank, and has a choice crew, and a good bulwark of black wooden shields. Manwe Sera has the London Town – which he has taken in charge instead of the Glasgow – on the left flank, the sides of the canoe bristling with guns, in the hands of tolerably steady men.
The monster canoe aims straight for my boat, as though it would run us down; but, when within fifty yards off, swerves aside, and, when nearly opposite, the warriors above the manned prow let fly their spears, and on either side there is a noise of rushing bodies. But every sound is soon lost in the ripping, crackling musketry. For five minutes we are so absorbed in firing that we take no note of anything else; but at the end of that time we are made aware that the enemy is reforming about 200 yards above us.
Our blood is up now. It is a murderous world, and we feel for the first time that we hate the filthy, vulturous ghouls who inhabit it. We therefore lift our anchors, and pursue them up-stream along the right bank, until rounding a point we see their villages. We make straight for the banks, and continue the fight in the village streets with those who have landed, hunt them out into the woods, and there only sound the retreat, having returned the daring cannibals the compliment of a visit.
(1988: vol. 2, 211–12)
As this will suggest, Through the Dark Continent frequently presents Stanley himself as an all-action hero, a figure of exemplary courage and manliness who seems to have sprung from the pages of the Boy’s Own magazine, or from the contemporary adventure fiction produced by authors such as G.A. Henty and Rider Haggard. And this is another way in which Stanley’s travel narrative contributes to colonial discourse. Like the fictions of Henty and Haggard, it seems calculated to rouse in some readers fantasies of adventure and heroism; and as Martin Green has noted, such ‘dreams of adventure’ often led in due course to ‘deeds of empire’, encouraging young men to travel to distant regions so as to realise their fantasies and ambitions (Green 1980).
As he recounts his many confrontations with what he dubs the ‘perverse cannibals and insensate savages’ (1988: vol. 2, 199) of the Congo region, Stanley deploys a number of tropes characteristic both of colonial discourse in its most extreme form, and also of any travel account in which another culture is ‘othered’ in an especially hostile or fearful fashion. Labelling his adversaries in the passage above ‘filthy, vulturous ghouls’, for example, Stanley dehumanises them. Here and elsewhere, meanwhile, he also frequently depicts his opponents as a frenzied mob, a swirling, undifferentiated mass of humanity seemingly in the grip of irrational fears and superstitions; and again, this is a rhetorical strategy that travel writers often use to dehumanise communities they find threatening or incomprehensible, since it allows both writer and reader to overlook the fact that every supposed ‘mob’ is actually made up of many unique individuals, each with their own life-story. Finally, in Stanley’s routine insistence that just about everyone he meets in central Africa is a cannibal we witness the deployment of what has perhaps been, across all cultures, one of the most common techniques of hostile or fearful ‘othering’. A great many societies historically have cast their enemies, and/or other peoples that they find especially repugnant, as cannibals; equally common, moreover, is for those ‘others’ to be accused of some form of sexual deviancy. Modern anthropologists suggest, however, that we should always be cautious about taking such accusations at face value (see Arens 1979; Boucher 1992; Obeyesekere 1992). This is not to deny that some human societies have almost certainly practised cannibalism, and it is also true that cultures have differed greatly in the sexual practices they consider acceptable (see Hyam 1990). Yet as William Arens (1979) has shown in relation to cannibalism, there is ample evidence that allegations of this type often bear little relation to the actual activities of the community under discussion. Rather, practices that one culture deems taboo will often function as powerful markers of cultural difference, which can be projected on to other cultures so as to emphasise their perceived barbarism and moral inferiority.
This is almost certainly what is happening when Stanley identifies so many of the tribes he encounters as cannibalistic. There are only a few occasions in which he offers any sort of evidence for this accusation, and in every case modern anthropologists would probably suggest that Stanley has significantly misread what he regards as signs of cannibalism. At the same time, however, it would not be entirely fair to accuse Stanley of wilful deceit in this matter. Although one suspects he sometimes used the term ‘cannibal’ simply to add to the sensationalism of his account, and to heighten his own heroism, it is likely that Stanley did genuinely believe that many of the tribes he encountered were cannibals. Rather, what his account demonstrates is the way a culture’s dominant discourses, in the Foucauldian/Saidian sense of that term, often shape significantly not just its images and representations of other cultures, but even the very perceptions of its travellers as they venture out into the world. In Stanley’s case, he was trained by the dominant discourses of his age to expect cannibalism in central Africa, and this expectation accordingly led him to interpret what now seems erroneous or, at best, highly ambiguous evidence as incontrovertible ‘signs’ of man-eating. For this was what Africanist traditions in Europe had always alleged about the indigenous population of sub-Saharan Africa. Classical and medieval writers such as Pliny and Leo Africanus, for example, had frequently presented sub-Saharan Africa as a place of primitive savagery, and as the monstrous antithesis of the civilised values of the Mediterranean world. And in the late nineteenth century, these age-old accusations had recently gained a new credibility and authority, as a consequence of the emergence of significant new discourse in European and North American culture; namely, the emergence of a supposed ‘science’ of race.
European and North American racial science had its origins in the Enlightenment quest to catalogue and classify every aspect of the natural world. Initially, scientists sought to chart the physical differences between the various branches of mankind. Very quickly, however, it began to be assumed that anatomical differences had as their corollary different intellectual and moral capabilities. This led in turn to works such as Robert Knox’s The Races of Man (1850), the Comte de Gobineau’s Essai sur l’Inégalité des Races Humaines (Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races; 1853–55), and J.R. Gliddon and J.C. Nott’s Types of Mankind (1854), which sought to classify, and to hierarchise, the different human races on the basis of what were supposed to be essential characteristics, inherent in every racial ‘type’. In due course, this classificatory agenda would fuse with the evolutionary theory advanced by Charles Darwin, to produce what one might broadly characterise as Social Darwinist theories, which claimed to chart the upward evolutionary ascent of some races, and the downward decline, or ‘degeneration’, of others. Whatever precise form they took, however, these hierarchies and theories invariably posited the intellectual and moral superiority of white peoples of European extraction, assigning black Africans one of the lowest rungs on the developmental ladder. Indeed, from the 1850s, sections of the Western scientific community argued vociferously that blacks were not just a separate race but a separate species. This was not universally accepted, but there was certainly a consensus in Western science at this date that the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa represented humanity in one of its most savage forms, especially in regions where the inhabitants had had little contact with non-African cultures.
This supposed ‘science’ of race is now regarded as utterly spurious, and as the product of essentially racist presuppositions and methodologies. Yet it was widely accepted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this being moreover a period in which, as Robert Young has written, ‘theories based on race spread from discipline to discipline, and became one of the major organising axioms of knowledge in general’ (1995: 93). Most European and American travellers of the period had accordingly absorbed, to some degree, these theories and axioms, and as a consequence they often interpreted what they encountered in other cultures as the expression of inherent racial traits. Stanley’s familiarity with contemporary race science, meanwhile, is frequently evident in Through the Dark Continent. Thus he distinguishes at one point between tribes who exemplify respectively ‘the truly debased Negro type’ and the ‘Ethiopic negro type’ (1988: vol. 2, 63), whilst elsewhere the first pygmy he encounters is described as an ‘ugly, prognathous-jawed creature’ (1988: vol. 2, 135); and ‘prognathous’ here, which signifies a significant elongation of the jawbone, is again part of the technical vocabulary of contemporary race theory.
Stanley was thus predisposed by his training in race science, and by his familiarity with European ‘Africanist’ discourse more generally, to find evidence of cannibalism and other ‘savage’, atavistic practices amongst the tribes of central Africa. At the same time, however, he does not espouse the most extreme forms of contemporary race theory, and there is consequently another important dimension to Stanley’s representation of Africa and Africans. The people he meets in the ‘dark continent’ are not all depicted in terms of savagery and irrational violence. He speaks admiringly, for example, of his guides and porters, and also of ethnic groups like the black population of Zanzibar. The latter are described as ‘capable of great love and affection, and possessed of gratitude and other noble traits of human nature’, and Stanley insists that they can be made ‘good, obedient servants’ (1988: vol. 1, 37). Here and elsewhere, he takes issue with contemporary commentators who claimed that ‘savage’ races were incapable of intellectual and moral improvement, and that they were therefore doomed to be supplanted, and possibly driven to extinction, by supposedly superior races. Instead, Stanley sees evidence of a potential for civilisation in some of coastal tribes he encounters, whom he regards as having been improved by their contact with non-African cultures.
Even as Stanley paints a more positive and sympathetic picture of African peoples, however, his tone is often highly condescending. He clearly takes it for granted that whilst ‘negro nature … [is] after all but human nature’ (1988: vol. 2, 371), there is nevertheless a huge gulf between the black and white races in terms of their intellectual, moral and cultural development. Thus when they are not presented in a sensationalistic manner, as bloodthirsty cannibals, the black Africans that Stanley meets are typically depicted in a more sentimental and patronising fashion, as child-like figures or as faithful servants. This is a combination of stereotypes and/or representational modes highly characteristic of colonial discourse, and the ideological work it performs, and the contribution it makes to the colonial enterprise, is fairly obvious. The sentimental agenda fashions an Other that is seemingly in need of help from an external power, and deserving of that help: it thus encourages and legitimates the acquisition of colonial territories under the guise of providing tutelage and benign guidance to the indigenous population. The sensationalistic agenda, meanwhile, emphasises the benighted condition from which the local population must saved, and the primitive superstitions and barbaric practices which must be suppressed by the forces of reason and civilisation.
In this way, Through the Dark Continent, like many other forms of colonial discourse, ultimately seems to suggest the desirability of European intervention in another region’s affairs. Crucially, it presents that intervention as desirable not simply because of the rich economic rewards on offer, but also as a means of providing the indigenous population with humanitarian assistance and a civilising influence. Thus Stanley declares Africa to be in need of a ‘band of philanthropic capitalists’ who will ‘rescue these beautiful lands’ (1988: vol. 1, 175) from their current savagery. Like many other explorers from the eighteenth century onwards, Stanley presents himself very much as an emissary of the so-called ‘three Cs’: civilisation, Christianity and commerce. It was through a combination of these three influences, it was generally assumed in Europe and North America, that ‘savage’, primitive peoples would be raised to a higher level of material, moral and intellectual development. This was a rationale for empire which was undoubtedly genuinely believed by some agents of colonialism; for many others, however, it was merely a pretext with which to justify the appropriation of territory and natural resources.
Whilst Stanley obviously encourages a sense of cultural superiority in his readers when he depicts Africans as savages or simpletons, his narrative also works in more subtle ways to produce this effect. For example, Stanley undertakes his trek across Africa ostensibly as an explorer, someone principally dedicated to scientific enquiry. This is a rationale for travel that has often possessed an ideological dimension in Europe and America. Scientific exploration from the eighteenth century onwards was generally regarded, both by the explorers themselves and by their readers, as an essentially benevolent, morally worthy incursion into another region or culture. Or as the critic Mary Louise Pratt has put it, explorers and commentators in this period generally sought to emphasise the extent to which exploration was not a matter of conquest, in the manner of earlier European crusaders and conquistadors, but rather of ‘anti-conquest’, as the explorer risked life and limb in the selfless pursuit of knowledge rather than territory or booty (2008: 37–83). As Pratt points out, however, this was a claim, and a self-image, often used to suggest a degree of moral and intellectual superiority over indigenous cultures. Thus eighteenth- and nineteenth-century exploration narratives frequently record meetings with tribal leaders who are deeply suspicious of the explorer’s claim to be simply gathering geographical and natural-historical information. Readers are meant to smile at the ignorance and backwardness this supposedly reveals; the implication is that only the enlightened citizens of Europe and North America have the largeness of vision to pursue knowledge for its own sake, and for the general good of all mankind. With hindsight, however, one might suggest that it was contemporary readers, rather than the tribal chiefs, who were being naïve here. For European and US explorers in this period were often quickly followed by more acquisitive, and more aggressive, representatives of their culture. Stanley’s explorations in Africa, for example, ushered in the notorious ‘Scramble for Africa’, in which the European powers rushed to carve out colonies for themselves in the continent. Stanley himself later led a further expedition to the Congo which claimed the region as a colony for Belgium, leading to the creation of the notoriously brutal Congo Free State.
Stanley’s designation of himself as an explorer or scientific traveller thus carries subtly an ideological resonance. By the same token, even when Stanley abandons his sensationalistic prose style for a more dispassionate, scientific idiom, his narrative techniques still work to position the ‘native’ as inferior to the explorer and his readers. The most blatantly racist assumptions underpinning much of the supposedly objective science of this era have been discussed already. At the same time, however, contemporary scientific discourse also assisted the colonialist cause, and fostered a sense of cultural superiority, by more subtle means. Like many Western travellers right down to the present day, for example, Stanley regarded the cultures he encountered in Africa in the light of what is sometimes termed a stadial theory of cultural development. That is to say, he assumed that human societies evolve naturally through successive stages of social, economic and technological development. A variety of such stadial schema have been utilised by Western commentators over the years. Eighteenth-century philosophers such as Adam Smith thought in terms of an evolution from hunter-gatherer communities, which were assumed to be the earliest and most primitive form of human society, to first pastoralism, then agriculture, and then finally a supposedly fully ‘modern’, commercial society. In the nineteenth century, meanwhile, this developmental schema was supplemented by the notion of Stone, Bronze and Iron Age cultures, and this is a terminology that Stanley uses at various junctures in Through the Dark Continent; for example, he suggests at one point that the ‘negroes of Zanzibar’ are ‘a people just emerged into the Iron Epoch, and now thrust forcibly under the notice of nations who have left them behind by the improvements of over 4000 years’ (1988: vol. 1, 38).
As a means of describing different sorts of socio-economic organisation, and/or the different technologies that cultures utilise, labels such as ‘hunter-gatherer’ and ‘Stone Age’ perhaps have some usefulness. More contentious, however, is the implicit assumption that these differences should be located in a temporal sequence, as successive stages in a process of cultural advancement that inevitably culminates in Western modernity. For as the quotation above from Stanley demonstrates, this assumption often carries with it the further implication that societies which have not developed in the same way as Western societies have therefore not developed at all, but remain stuck in an earlier historical phase which the West has supposedly outgrown. Thus there occurs in many travelogues, and in many Western depictions of the Other more generally, what Johannes Fabian has termed a ‘denial of coevalness’ (Fabian 1983: 31; 37–70). That is to say, many Western travellers take it for granted that it is only they and their compatriots who are properly modern. The ‘others’ that they encounter, meanwhile, are frequently regarded almost as living fossils, and as being to a greater or lesser degree survivals from an earlier epoch. Hence the frequent conflation of geographical and temporal distance in many Western travelogues, as travellers venture to some remote or unfamiliar region and simultaneously present themselves as going back in time, encountering ‘Stone Age’, ‘Bronze Age’ or ‘medieval’ cultures that are assumed to have remained unchanged for centuries.
To attribute historical stasis to another culture in this way is of course a fallacy. All cultures develop and change over time; in the case of supposedly ‘traditional’ indigenous communities, it is simply that those changes have led in a different direction, and so produced a society which does not conform to the traveller’s expectations of ‘modernity’. Both traveller and Other in fact inhabit the same historical moment. By implicitly or explicitly denying ‘coevalness’, however, Western travellers and their audiences can position themselves as the emissaries of modernity and progress, and so subtly claim a superiority over the others they describe. This impression is heightened, moreover, by the frequent use in scientific discourse, and in many scientifically inclined travelogues, of the so-called ‘ethnographic present’. This is the term often used for a present-tense, normative voice, which purports to sum up the behaviour and beliefs of an entire culture. It is in this mode, for example, that Stanley informs us that ‘the Waganda [tribesman] peels his bananas, folds them carefully up in the form of a parcel, enclosed in green banana-leaves, and putting a small quantity of water in his pot, cooks them with the steam alone’ (1988: vol. 1, 322). Note that Stanley does not say that the individual Waganda tribesmen whom he happened to observe cooked their bananas in this fashion; instead, he deduces universal patterns of behaviour on the basis of what he has seen. This use of the ‘ethnographic present’, it has been suggested, fosters a sense that indigenous cultures are essentially uniform, fixed and unchanging, as if they have a set of core behaviours and beliefs which everyone follows, and which have always existed, without any sort of development over time. This is arguably another means by which indigenous communities can be subtly positioned, in Western discourse, as being somehow ‘outside’ proper history, or without a history of their own, at least until their first encounter with European or North American travellers (see Wolf 1982; Fabian 1983).
In this way Stanley’s account of the indigenous peoples of central Africa weaves together sensational, sentimental and scientific modes of representation. In their different ways, however, all these modes work ultimately to position black Africans as inferior to white Europeans, and thereby help to convey a moral justification for European intervention in African affairs. And these are representational strategies typical of a great many European and US travelogues of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially those describing encounters with non-white peoples. The travel writing genre thus carries a troubling legacy, being deeply implicated, at both a practical and an ideological level, in the imperialist enterprise. At the same time, however, if the general tendency of Western travel writing, from at least the early modern period, has undoubtedly been to assist and encourage European and subsequently US expansionism, that does not mean that every individual traveller and travelogue has been equally complicit in this project. As always, the enormous diversity encompassed by the genre needs to be kept in mind; and as a result, any sort of wholesale condemnation of the genre on the grounds of racism and imperialism needs to be qualified and nuanced in a variety of ways.
All travel writing must be to some degree ethnocentric, since as discussed in Chapter 4, all travellers necessarily see the world and communicate their observations through an interpretative framework, or in Foucauldian terminology, through the ‘discourses’ provided by their culture. Yet the extent to which travellers are ethnocentric in their outlook, and correspondingly, the extent to which they are able to acknowledge, tolerate and/or appreciate other points of view and alien cultural practices, may vary greatly. Similarly, the intent with which travellers construct their necessarily partial accounts of other cultures can also vary significantly. Even in the high imperial era, there were travellers who adopted what one might broadly describe as an anti-imperialist position, seeking to oppose European or US territorial ambitions in a given region, or to expose the abuses and suffering inflicted by such interventions. Roger Casement, for example, produced in the early twentieth century powerful accounts of the brutal treatment of the Congolese, and of the Putomayo Indians of Peru, at the hands of European commercial enterprises. Similarly, as Robert Irwin has emphasised in his riposte to Said’s Orientalism, European and US travellers and scholars have not all universally denigrated the so-called ‘Orient’, nor have they all sought to assist Western domination of the region; in fact, some produced highly complimentary accounts of ‘Oriental’ cultures, and championed independence movements in Asia and the Middle East (see Irwin 2006).
Insofar as they critique and rebuke their own culture in this way, such travellers stand in a long tradition of Western travel writing, stretching at least as far back as Bartolomeo de las Casas’s Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552). Travel accounts of this type may be regarded, in Foucauldian/Saidian terminology, as a counter-discourse running in opposition to the dominant tendency of the travel writing genre in the West. Yet even these seemingly oppositional travelogues will often be entangled in complex ways with the prevailing discourses of the day. A key part of the usefulness of the Foucauldian concept of the discourse is that it encourages us to consider how far travellers may unwittingly draw upon, and contribute to, prevailing assumptions and representational conventions, even when their avowed aim is to contest stereotypes and prejudices. De las Casas, for example, rejects earlier depictions of the indigenous population of America as barbarous savages in thrall to Satan, yet he replaces this pejorative stereotype with a patronising imagery of native Americans as innocent children and ‘sweete lambs’ (quoted in Campbell 1988: 207). He still assumes, moreover, that they are in urgent need of spiritual redemption from the Christian church. With regard to the anti-imperial Orientalists identified by Irwin, meanwhile, what Irwin sometimes fails to acknowledge is the extent to which the information garnered by these figures contributed to a larger body of knowledge that was useful to agents of empire and colonialism, notwithstanding the original intentions of many individual travellers.
There have also been many Western travellers over the centuries who have regarded the cultures that they visit as superior to their own. These travellers will accordingly often ‘other’ the peoples that they meet in a more favourable and complimentary fashion than Stanley in Through the Dark Continent. In some cases, these favourable portrayals of the Other draw upon, and contribute to, the longstanding Western tradition of the ‘noble savage’. Although this phrase was only coined in the late seventeenth century, by the English poet John Dryden, it refers to a concept with a much older history. Since at least the time of Michel de Montaigne’s essay ‘Of Cannibals’ (1580), and arguably as far back as the Roman historian Tacitus’s account of Germanic tribespeople in his Germania (c.98 CE), some Western commentators and travellers have regarded supposedly ‘primitive’ societies as morally superior to their own. This primitivism, or valorisation of the primitive, became especially pronounced in the eighteenth century and early nineteenth centuries, under the influence of Romanticism. Typically it took one of two forms, both predicated on the fundamental assumption that peoples apparently living closer to nature retained virtues that were lost in more complex and sophisticated societies. So-called ‘soft’ primitivism held up for admiration peoples whose simple lifestyles seemed to recall the ‘Golden Age’ or Arcadia of classical mythology; the Tahitians, for example, who seemed to live without undue labour off the natural resources of their island. ‘Hard’ primitivism, meanwhile, celebrated more rugged peoples such as the Maori or the Highlanders of Scotland, who were deemed to embody a manliness and courage that was supposedly lost in more effete, civilised cultures (see Smith 1969).
As the nineteenth century wore on, and as the race science discussed earlier became more influential, many commentators and travellers sought to debunk the notion of the noble savage. Thus Mark Twain in Roughing It (1872) dismisses the romanticised account of native Americans given by novelists such as Fenimore Cooper, offering instead the harsh verdict that the ‘Red Man’ is in fact ‘treacherous, filthy and repulsive’ (1985: 169). Yet from the late eighteenth century right down to the present day, a primitivist impulse, and a desire to seek some form of moral or spiritual education from supposedly less sophisticated cultures, has been a significant motivation in many forms of Western travel and travel writing. And this impulse has in turn given rise to many admiring accounts of other cultures.
‘Othering’ in this laudatory form might seem preferable to the sort of denigration of the Other that Stanley engages in. Yet it too is often morally dubious, and epistemologically problematic. Such positive representations of the Other can obviously span a spectrum which runs from conscientious attempts to describe another culture’s actual beliefs and practices to fanciful, highly romanticised depictions. The latter, of course, may reduce the people being described to a caricature just as much as Stanley’s sensationalistic account of the Congolese. In many cases, the Other here chiefly serves a rhetorical function, having projected on to it attributes and values that the traveller deems missing in his or her own culture. The image thus created of another people will often bear little relation to the actuality of their lives and lifestyles. In some cases, indeed, this romanticised image may be a means by which the hardship and suffering endured by another community or society is conveniently overlooked. As the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo has noted, it is often only when an indigenous culture has been defeated and subdued that an imagery of ‘noble savages’, supposedly living in harmony with nature, begins to circulate in the conquering culture. This imagery therefore sometimes functions as a form of ‘imperialist nostalgia’ (Rosaldo 1989: 108), which may work to obscure both what was done to these colonial subjects in the process of so-called ‘pacification’, and the conditions in which they now live. Furthermore, the myth of the noble savage has sometimes contributed to imperial and colonial endeavours in a more straightforward fashion. It is likely, for example, that Fenimore Cooper’s idealised depictions of native Americans encouraged some young men and women to seek out frontier regions where they might encounter ‘Indians’ living traditional lifestyles, and in this way Fenimore Cooper’s novels can be said to have promoted the westward drift of European settlers in America.
Even admiring and highly favourable accounts of other cultures, then, may constitute in subtle ways a form of colonial discourse. At the same time, however, it must be remembered that one may represent the Other in ways that are respectful or admiring without necessarily being excessively fanciful and romanticising, and that some travellers have done so in accounts which offer a sharp rebuke to imperial ambitions and colonial practices. Further to this, there is another important qualification to make to the suggestion that travel writing, or at least Western travel writing, has been invariably colonialist in tendency. More specifically, it must be kept in mind that even when Western travellers do engage in the sort of highly pejorative ‘othering’ found in Stanley’s Through the Dark Continent, they are not all situated to the same degree as Stanley in larger networks of imperial power. Writing in the high imperial era, Stanley’s sense of superiority over the Africans he meets is underwritten by the massive technological, military and economic advantages possessed by the industrialised Western powers at this date. These advantages also enabled Stanley’s readers to undertake some of the colonial projects he implicitly outlines in Through the Dark Continent. In this way, as Said and other postcolonialist critics emphasise, there is an important linkage in the high imperial era between representation and power: between, on the one hand, the images of the Other produced by travellers and commentators and, on the other, the policies and practices subsequently pursued by their compatriots, both as they acquire and as they administer colonial territories.
However, this linkage is not necessarily to be assumed in every context, and/or in every period. In the medieval and early modern periods, for example, many European travellers and commentators often ‘othered’ other cultures in a hostile or pejorative fashion on the page, but in many cases they were not in a position to act upon these stereotypes, or to harbour imperial ambitions towards the Other. Until well into the eighteenth century, for example, many Europeans regarded the mighty Ottoman Empire with envy and a profound sense of inferiority, being keenly aware that their own countries lagged far behind this Islamic state in terms of military power and cultural sophistication. As late as 1625, meanwhile, Barbary pirates could raid the English coastline, carrying off men, women and children as slaves. It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that hostile ‘Orientalist’ representations of the Muslim world circulated extensively in British culture in the early modern period, and that many travellers viewed the Muslim societies that they visited through this Orientalist lens. Yet to describe these hostile attitudes and stereotypes as being ‘imperialist’ or ‘colonialist’ in tendency is at this date somewhat misleading; in due course these attitudes and stereotypes would underpin and shape colonial policies and ambitions, but in the period they originally circulated they were expressive not so much of the West’s power, as of its sense of powerlessness with regard to the Muslim world. This situation was replicated in Europe’s dealings with many other cultures in Asia and Africa until well into the eighteenth century. One must accordingly be wary of viewing medieval and early modern travellers anachronistically, and of ascribing to them and their cultures a degree of colonial power, or even colonial ambition, that in some situations they did not yet possess (see Clark 1999: 4–10).
Strategies of Othering II: Travel Writing and Neo-Colonialism
The vast European empires of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were dismantled, for the most part, in the era of decolonisation that followed the Second World War. As a consequence, one might assume that modern travel writing cannot be situated in, or contribute to, the same sort of networks and infrastructures of global power as existed in the high imperial era. Further to this, a cursory survey of recent travel writing would suggest that the genre has also changed dramatically in tone since the end of empire. It is rare today, for example, to encounter the overt racism and cultural supremacism that characterised many European and US travelogues in the imperial era. Instead, modern travel writers from the West are more likely to espouse what Debbie Lisle describes as a ‘cosmopolitan vision’ (2006: 4). This cosmopolitanism typically seeks not to denigrate but to celebrate alterity and cultural difference; or as Lisle puts it, travel writers today generally ‘frame encounters with others in positive ways’, so as to ‘reveal moments of empathy, [ … ] realisations of equality, and insights into shared values’ (2006: 4). Travel writing, one might accordingly argue, has successfully reinvented itself. For long periods in the West, the genre was undoubtedly closely bound up with the drive to dominate and exploit other regions of the world. Now, however, it arguably assists a project of ‘global community’, mutual understanding and tolerance, by ‘teaching us how to appreciate cultural difference and recognise the values common to all humanity’ (Lisle 2006: 4).
After articulating what one might call the cosmopolitan case for modern travel writing, however, Lisle goes on to critique sharply these claims for the genre, and in the process paints a more troubling picture of travel writing’s role in contemporary Western culture. For her as for many other recent commentators (see, inter alia, Sugnet 1991; Kaplan 1996; Holland and Huggan 1998), the genre’s imperialist legacy continues in diverse ways, notwithstanding the self-professed cosmopolitanism of many modern travel writers. As these critics point out, the modern travel book remains principally a medium in which Western (and usually white) writers regale Western audiences with tales of their travels. As they do so, Charles Sugnet has suggested, travel writers typically ‘arrogate to [themselves] … rights of representation, judgement and mobility that [are] effects of empire’ (1991: 72). For Sugnet, accordingly, much recent travel writing is both predicated on, and generative of, an implicitly imperialist attitude which takes for granted the right of Western travellers to roam the world and pronounce authoritatively on its inhabitants. Furthermore, the pronouncements these travellers make, and the images they fashion of other peoples and places, arguably sustain and legitimate the comparatively privileged position of most travel writers and their readers. Much recent travel writing, it has been suggested, is principally concerned to ‘package’ the world for easy Western consumption, producing images of the Other that reassure Western readers not only of their superiority over the rest of the world, but also of their moral right to that sense of superiority. To this way of thinking, accordingly, travel writing remains a genre thoroughly enmeshed in, and contributive to, the neo-colonial networks of power and inequality by which the West maintains its current global dominance.
In this context, it is perhaps unsurprising that many of the characteristic tropes of colonial discourse, and many of that discourse’s strategies for representing the Other, have survived in contemporary travel writing, albeit often in subtly reinvented forms. That said, sometimes the use of these rhetorical strategies is decidedly unsubtle. Take the example of Peter Biddlecombe’s French Lessons in Africa (1993), which describes the author’s experiences whilst conducting business in French-speaking West Africa in the 1980s. Here we encounter comments such as the following:
‘I’ve spent nearly thirty years in Africa. I love Africa … But, honestly, it can be the most inefficient, corrupt, impossible place on earth. You do everything you can for them [that is, Africans]. You give your life for them. And what do they do? They steal the money from right under your nose.’ He sighed a big sigh. ‘But I still can’t help loving them. They’re like children, they don’t know they’re doing wrong.’
(Biddlecombe 1993: 159)
The speaker here is not Biddlecombe himself, but a French financial adviser working in the Congo. Yet in context, and from the tenor of his travelogue generally, it is clear that Biddlecombe wholly endorses this patronising and paternalistic attitude. He does meet Africans who are enterprising, self-reliant and honest, but over the course of the whole narrative these come to seem isolated figures, struggling ineffectually against the general tendency of their culture. Thus it is ultimately a predictable, and highly stereotypical, picture that Biddlecombe paints of post-independence Africa and its inhabitants, one that defines the region chiefly in terms of superstition, tribalism, mindless petty bureaucracy, and massive corruption in both political and economic affairs. And it is seemingly these factors that are the principal cause of the extreme poverty and suffering everywhere apparent in the continent, which Biddlecombe also documents in some detail.
It is not only Africans who are depicted in a clichéd, stereotypical fashion in French Lessons in Africa. A German woman is lampooned as an ‘enormous Brunhilde’ (Biddlecombe 1993: 95), whilst the French people Biddlecombe meets are generally portrayed as epicures obsessed with fine dining. For Biddlecombe as for his nineteenth-century predecessor Stanley, it seems, the peoples of the world may be easily differentiated according to a well-established set of national and ethnic characteristics, and individuals will for the most part conform to their national and ethnic ‘type’. In this way travelogues like French Lessons in Africa convey to their readers a reassuring sense that cultural identities may be easily defined, and that there are clear demarcations to be drawn between ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘home’ and ‘abroad’. When the ‘abroad’ in question is a region as troubled as Africa, moreover, this rhetoric of cultural differentiation is doubly reassuring, since it usually works to distance the traveller from the problems besetting the Other. Those problems come to seem indigenous to the region, as it were, and chiefly the fault and responsibility of local circumstances and the local population.
In many cases, however, it is highly simplistic for Western travellers and their readers to ascribe the suffering and turmoil they encounter elsewhere in the world entirely to local causes. To do so, moreover, often constitutes a significant evasion of their own culture’s complicity in the scenes they are witnessing. For example, Biddlecombe has plenty of stories to tell of political corruption and tyranny amongst Africa’s political elite, and also of the many bloody coups and civil wars that have racked the continent since independence. Yet these episodes are seldom put in a larger historical and geopolitical context. There is little reference, for example, to the problems created in Africa, sometimes deliberately, when departing colonial powers left behind them arbitrarily constructed nation-states that often yoked together hostile tribes or cultures. Nor is there any discussion of the extent to which modern tribal animosities in Africa are the product of colonial policies that sought to ‘divide and rule’ subject populations. Finally, the instability of many African regimes since independence, and the despotism of some of them, is also partly a consequence of Cold War politics, as the continent became an arena in which the West and the former USSR could do battle by proxy. Again, however, there is little detailed discussion of this geopolitical background in French Lessons in Africa.
With regard to the poverty and economic backwardness he observes in Africa, similarly, Biddlecombe seldom pauses to consider to what extent the continent’s present condition is the result of a long history of exploitation and appropriation by external powers. The slave trade is briefly mentioned, but tellingly Biddlecombe seems more concerned to emphasise that Africans themselves were just as responsible for this atrocity as Europeans and Arabs (1993: 9–10). The restructuring of local economies enforced by European colonialism receives little consideration, nor does Biddlecombe ever address in detail the constraints and handicaps imposed on many African nations in the world economy today: the unfair trade agreements which protect Western farmers and manufacturers, for example, or the liberalisation policies imposed on African nations by Western-dominated institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). For many commentators, these are the mechanisms that create the modern, neo-colonial world order. Biddlecombe makes much of the fact that he is in Africa as a business traveller; indeed, as an ardent Thatcherite, he is often keen to assert that ‘business’, left to its own devices and freed from undue regulation, will ultimately provide the panacea to Africa’s many problems. One presumes, therefore, that Biddlecombe was in a position to gauge something of the success, or otherwise, of IMF austerity measures and similar Western-imposed economic programmes, yet he offers few observations on these matters; moreover, there is a significant lacuna in his account when it comes to explaining just what his own business was in the region, and how precisely it impacted on local populations.
This is not to say, of course, that the problems currently besetting Africa were wholly created by outside forces. Nor is it to suggest that every policy pursued by Western nations in Africa, in either the colonial or postcolonial era, has worked to the detriment of the indigenous population. Yet one must be deeply wary of any travelogue that gives no consideration to these issues, ascribing the continent’s suffering instead solely to internal factors such as tribalism, residual savagery and corruption. Once again, the ideological work such travelogues perform seems obvious. They enable a Western audience in the first place to disclaim any responsibility for Africa’s problems, thereby evading the troubling possibility that their own affluence may be predicated on unjust networks of trade and power, either in the past or the present, that have inflicted hardship elsewhere. Simultaneously, they foster a sense of moral and cultural superiority in the Western reader, insofar as they suggest implicitly that it is only the developed nations of Europe and North America that are genuinely modern, civilised and enlightened.
Africa is not the only region of the world typically depicted in this way by Western travel writers and their readers. The themes developed by Biddlecombe in French Lessons in Africa, and the imagery he uses, can be paralleled in a great many recent accounts of Afghanistan, the Balkans, the Middle East and other similarly troubled or dangerous parts of the globe (see Lisle 2006: 152–64). Such regions are routinely presented as being in thrall to atavistic, irrational attitudes, and consequently prone to tribalism and internecine feuding. In that well-established, temporalising trope of dismissive ‘othering’, meanwhile, they are routinely regarded as somehow not inhabiting the same time period as the traveller and his/her culture, and as being anachronistic survivals from an earlier, more barbarous era. Thus much contemporary travel writing still works, either implicitly or explicitly, to position the West at the forefront of modernity and progress. This in turn helps subtly to legitimate the current world order, and the global dominance of the West, since the further implication of these accounts of the Other is that it is only the West which possesses the expertise and moral vision to administer global affairs. And some recent travelogues in this vein, it should be noted, have more directly influenced Western policy towards other regions of the world. A notorious example is Robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History (1993). Kaplan visited the Balkans during the Bosnian–Serbian war of 1992–95, and like many Western visitors to the region, both before, during and after the war, he attributes the conflict to age-old, ‘tribal’ animosities. Indeed, like many Western commentators over the years he often seems to suggest that a predisposition to violence is somehow ‘hard-wired’ in the local population (see Hammond 2009: xvi). This has the effect of obscuring the more precise political circumstances which generated the Bosnian-Serbian war. And this in turn, it has been suggested, influenced the decision of the US President Bill Clinton not to send peacekeeping troops to Bosnia in the early 1990s; Balkan Ghosts allegedly convinced the President that the country’s problems were intractable, and that a peacekeeping force would achieve little.
Biddlecombe’s French Lessons in Africa is a highly anecdotal travelogue, of the ‘easy reading’ type, which makes little claim to methodological rigour as it presents its account of Africa. Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts, however, demonstrates that the prevailing tropes of Western discourse often permeate travelogues that profess to be far more journalistic and rigorous in their approach. Travelogues with literary aspirations, meanwhile, usually avoid the more obviously clichéd stereotypes that Biddlecombe uses, but they are often just as guilty of ‘othering’ peoples and cultures in ways that make them seem primitive and atavistic in comparison with the supposedly enlightened West. Often, indeed, a depiction along these lines is essential to the atmosphere of exoticism and/or danger that the writer wishes to generate; it provides the necessary backdrop against which he or she can construct an image of themselves as intrepid adventurer, or as ‘traveller’ in the heroic sense of that term. Just like Biddlecombe, moreover, many literary travel writers shy away from revealing, or interrogating, their own motives for travel, and the economic and social privileges which enable their travelling. By evading these issues, they omit from their accounts the more complex web of inter-relations, and the historical contexts and present-day economic and political networks, which connect themselves and their home culture to the regions they are visiting. ‘Elsewhere’ is thus kept safely ‘other’: abroad is presented not so much as a real place inhabited by fellow human beings who are properly our equals and contemporaries, but rather as an arena or playground where Western travellers may seek out thrilling adventures, or work through personal psychodramas.
In the neo-colonial as in the colonial era, positive as well as negative representations of the Other may work to sustain the unequal power relations between the West and the rest of the world. The counterpart to accounts such as Biddlecombe’s, which emphasise the primitive and uncivilised nature of many troubled regions of the world, are travelogues which unduly romanticise and exoticise other regions and cultures. Often these accounts use tropes of temporalisation and historical stasis similar to those found in accounts of dangerous or barbarous ‘others’, only here the survivals from the past are valorised rather than vilified by the traveller; they signify a culture supposedly untouched by the worst aspects of modernity. In many cases, travelogues of this sort are a continuation of the ‘noble savage’ tradition discussed earlier in this chapter, and many of the criticisms made earlier about this tradition remain pertinent today. As Robyn Davidson recognises, many depictions of indigenous communities present those communities as ‘quaint primitives to be gawked at by readers who couldn’t really give a damn what was happening to them’ (1998: 141). Davidson is thinking specifically here of Western media representations, and of magazines such as National Geographic. Yet her criticism is also relevant to the representations of the Other found in many recent travelogues. Here one might cite again the controversy occasioned by Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines (1987), which was briefly mentioned in Chapter 5. One of the problems with The Songlines, for hostile critics, was not just that Chatwin made cultural capital, and ultimately financial profit, out of the spiritual traditions of Australian Aboriginal peoples; it was also that he unduly romanticised modern Aboriginal life by focusing so exclusively on its spiritual dimension. This was an emphasis that may well have produced a highly reverential depiction of ancestral Aboriginal wisdom, yet it also, in the eyes of some commentators, worked more dubiously to obscure the material conditions in which many Aborigines live today, and the pressing political and economic difficulties which they currently face as disadvantaged members of modern Australian society (see Huggan 1991; Shakespeare 1999: 489–90; Lisle 2006: 61–67).
It is not only peoples and cultures in the so-called ‘developing world’ that are routinely depicted in such a romanticised fashion. A mainstay of recent travel writing has been idyllic accounts of travellers visiting or relocating to regions and rural communities in Europe and North America which offer a slower-paced, more traditional lifestyle. This is the pastoral fantasy provided by such popular travelogues as Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence (1989). In this branch of the genre, metropolitan travellers and their audiences often apply much the same imagery to rural or supposedly ‘traditional’ communities as they do to ‘noble savages’ in more distant regions of the world. And the consequences are often much the same, as these travelogues underplay the political and economic pressures that many of these communities currently face, and the negotiations they necessarily make with modernity, in order to present a highly idealised account of provincial life.
Contemporary travel writing in this romanticising mode frequently works as an adjunct to the tourist industry, and to what has been termed the ‘tourist gaze’ (Urry, 1990), notwithstanding the efforts many travel writers make to distinguish themselves from ‘mere’ tourists. For travel writers may be just as guilty as tourists of regarding other cultures and landscapes chiefly as aesthetic spectacles, which seemingly exist solely for their personal enjoyment and edification. Arguably, moreover, the efforts of many travel writers to get off ‘the beaten track’ and escape conventional tourist itineraries simply helps to create new destinations and itineraries. As they depict communities and landscapes that are supposedly still authentic, pristine and unspoiled, many travelogues work, often inadvertently, to stimulate touristic interest in those destinations. In the process, the images fashioned by travel writers may become iconic; they are what later travellers expect and demand to find. In this way, travel writing, like the so-called ‘tourist gaze’, sometimes works a dubious transformative effect on the places and peoples it describes. The iconic features of another culture or landscape become ‘sacralized’ (MacCannell 1999: 42–48), and in due course fetishised and commodified; they are what the tourist industry then sells to its customers as an ‘authentic’ experience of the Other. Yet as many analysts have pointed out, the need to meet tourist expectations in this regard will often dramatically affect local landscapes, lifestyles and occupations. In this way, other peoples and places can in a sense be held hostage by the iconography that attaches to them in Western culture. And much contemporary travel writing arguably colludes with this tendency insofar as it works first to establish this iconography, and thereafter to underplay the impact of modernity, and especially of tourism, on many other regions of the world.
Other Voices: Contesting Travel Writing’s Colonialist Tendencies
It will be apparent that commentators who regard travel writing as invariably a force for good in the world, or simply as a harmless ‘medium through which humans celebrate [their] freedom’ (Cocker 1992: 260), are being unduly naïve and uncritical. As James Clifford has noted, a ‘historical taintedness’ clings both to Western travel writing, and to many Western traditions of travel more generally ( 1997: 39). This has led some commentators to regard the genre as inherently imperialist and exploitative. Yet as Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan note, ‘it would be as foolish to claim of travel writing that it is uniformly imperialistic as it would be to defend travel writers as being harmless entertainers’ (1998: ix). We have already seen some of the ways in which a blanket condemnation of the genre on these grounds needs to be qualified when dealing with Western travel writing of the colonial and precolonial eras; in this final section, we shall discuss some of the ways in which recent, ‘postcolonial’ travel writing has sought to throw off the genre’s problematic legacy.
In the first place, it is worth noting that whilst modern travel writing in the West is still dominated by white Western writers, the genre increasingly admits other voices, and other perspectives on the world. Recent decades have witnessed, for example, a surge in travelogues written by individuals from formerly colonised cultures, or alternatively, by Western travellers who are the descendants of formerly subject, ‘subaltern’ peoples. To a much greater extent than was ever previously the case, accordingly, one may now encounter in travel writing the observations of Indian travellers like Vikram Seth and Amitav Ghosh, African travellers like Tété-Michel Kpomassie, and many more travellers who proudly lay claim to complex, ‘hyphenated’ identities. Thus Jamaica Kincaid’s background is both Antiguan and American, whilst Colleen McElroy is African American; Caryl Philips and Gary Younge define themselves as Black British or British Caribbean; Tahir Shah is a British Afghan; and Pico Iyer presents himself as simultaneously ‘a British subject, an American resident and an Indian citizen’ (Iyer 1988: 24).
It is the travel writing produced by figures like these, along with that written by travellers descended from the European settler populations in former colonies such as Canada, Australia and South Africa, that is often labelled ‘postcolonial’ in recent discussions of the form (see, for example, Korte 2000: 150–78). This is arguably a misleading designation; strictly speaking, all travel writing produced from the late 1960s onward is ‘postcolonial’, whatever the cultural or ethnic heritage of the traveller. Yet the label is useful insofar as it signifies travellers whose backgrounds often make them more alert to the complex legacies of empire, and to the ongoing networks of power and trade that interconnect and order the world today, than travellers like Biddlecombe. As the British-Indian writer Salman Rushdie suggests in his 1987 travelogue, The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey, the many travellers today who do not ‘have [their] origins in the countries of the mighty West or North’ are likely to have in common some experience, either personal or familial, of imperial subjugation, and so are more likely to possess ‘some knowledge of what weakness was like, some awareness of the view from underneath, and of how it felt to be there, on the bottom, looking up at the descending heel’ (1987: 12). As a result, they are often less disposed to imperialist nostalgia, and less inclined to patronise or vilify other cultures simply because they have not yet emulated Western modernity.
In some cases, this ‘postcolonial’ travel writing seeks expressly to challenge Western stereotypes and attitudes. In this way, for example, Jamaica Kincaid and Caryl Philips produce a kind of ‘countertravel writing’ (Holland and Huggan 1998: 50; emphasis in the original), which seeks in diverse ways to reverse the genre’s traditional focus and agenda in the West. Thus Kincaid writes in A Small Place (1988) about what may seem to Western eyes an idyllic destination, the Caribbean island of Antigua. As she blends elements of fiction, travelogue and essay, however, Kincaid’s narrative voice fluctuates between that of traveller and local, and in the latter role she offers a withering critique of the impact of tourism on the island, and of the bitter legacy of empire and colonial-era racism. Philips’s The European Tribe (1987), meanwhile, reverses the usual travel trajectory described in Western travel writing. If it is still more common for the genre to record the observations of white Europeans amongst black ‘natives’, here a black man presents his account of a tour through a Europe that is white-dominated, and largely hostile to blacks. The tone is frequently angry and denunciatory, as Philips seeks to make European readers appreciate how they themselves exhibit the tribalism which is routinely attributed to supposedly more backward cultures. Further to this, The European Tribe also makes the European reader of travel writing appreciate what it is like to be the object of the travel writer’s gaze. Philips has been criticised for the brief and somewhat cursory accounts he offers of many cultures and communities in Europe (see Holland and Huggan 1998: 51). Yet to be riled by these simplifying or distorting judgements is of course to be put in the position of many subaltern populations around the world, who have often been unable to contest the lazy generalisations made about them in Western travel writing; and in this way, The European Tribe is arguably both a continuation yet also a subversion of the Western travel writing tradition.
If Kincaid and Philips in their different ways reverse some of the norms of Western travel writing, other postcolonial travel writers seek to expand and reinvent the genre by exploring viewpoints, histories and cross-cultural connections that have often been overlooked or suppressed in the West. Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (1992), for example, relates the experience of an Indian traveller conducting anthropological fieldwork in the rural regions of Egypt. Interwoven with this personal narrative is Ghosh’s historical reconstruction of the lives of a twelfth-century Indian slave, Bomma, and his Jewish owner, Abraham Ben Yiju. The chief record of these figures are letters written to Ben Yiju by an Arab merchant, Khalaf ibn Ishaq, and as Ghosh reconstructs the links between Bomma, Ben Yiju and Ibn Ishaq, he offers a moving account of the complex networks of trade, culture and friendship that linked India and the Middle East in the centuries prior to European colonialism. A region of the world which Western ‘Orientalist’ scholarship has generally regarded as backward and culturally inferior to the West is thus revealed as the site of a sophisticated, cosmopolitan culture. The historical role of the West in this region, meanwhile, comes to seem not the introduction of ‘civilisation’, as Western travel writers have so often claimed, but rather its destruction. And the present-day portions of the narrative reveal the ongoing legacy of this catastrophic European intervention, as Ghosh traces the ties and the tensions that exist today between two regions of the ‘global south’ keenly aware of their comparative powerlessness on the world stage.
Not all so-called ‘postcolonial’ travel writers seek to challenge Western stereotypes and assumptions in this way. Perhaps the most famous postcolonial travel writer is V.S. Naipaul, a Trinidadian of Indian descent who has lived and worked in Britain for most of his adult life. Naipaul’s many travelogues, like his novels, speak eloquently of the sense of homelessness and displacement that can result from a mixed cultural heritage, and from a ‘hyphenated’ identity. This is a theme he shares with many postcolonial travel writers; unlike most other writers writing from an overtly postcolonial perspective, however, Naipaul has also demonstrated a marked tendency to lambast many of the ‘Third World’ cultures that he visits, in ways which often endorse prevailing Western stereotypes. In the eyes of many critics, accordingly, Naipaul is an apologist for Western neo-colonialism (see Nixon 1992; Said 1993: 320–21); although there are also critics who argue for a more nuanced response to his work (see Huggan 1994; Dooley 2006). Other readers, meanwhile, claim that Naipaul’s travel writing provides a salutary counterpoint to the left-liberal political correctness supposedly dominant in the academy today; this is an argument often advanced by Naipaul’s admirers as they defend his work in letters to newspapers and magazines, and in online discussion forums.
Naipaul’s career is often invoked by critics who see travel writing as a fundamentally exploitative and imperialist genre, which by engaging in ‘the production of difference’ (Lisle 2006: 24) necessarily always ‘others’ individuals and cultures in morally dubious ways. Yet this is surely to overstate matters. As James Clifford has written, in a globalised world ‘it is more than ever crucial for different peoples to form complex concrete images of one another, as well as of the relationships of knowledge and power that connect them’ (1983: 119). As the present chapter has shown, travel writing both historically and in recent years has not always helped this enterprise. The images and representations provided by the genre have often been grossly simplified, and they have often worked to obscure or deny the ‘relationships of knowledge and power that connect’ travellers and readers to the peoples and places being described. Yet the examples of Kincaid, Ghosh and others suggest that at its best, travel writing may enlighten and challenge readers, by revealing cultural and historical perspectives which have otherwise been overlooked or suppressed. And one might add that it is not only travel writers from obviously ‘postcolonial’ backgrounds whose work contributes to this project. One might cite here travelogues as varied as Hugh Brody’s account of the Beaver Indians in Maps And Dreams (1981), Barry Lopez’s account of Inuit tribespeople in Arctic Dreams (1986), Peter Robb’s account of the Mafia’s baleful presence in Italy in Midnight in Sicily (1996) and Daniel Everett’s account of the Piraha people of Brazil in Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes (2008). None are without their flaws and distortions, since as we have seen the translation of one culture into other must always be to some degree a mistranslation, and a partial representation. Without disregarding these flaws, however, these and many other recent travelogues arguably demonstrate that it is possible for travel writing to create images of other cultures which are complex, respectful and (where appropriate) sympathetic, whilst also remaining mindful of the ‘relationships of knowledge and power’ that operate in the modern world.