- Introduction
- Chapter One
- Chapter Two
- Chapter Three
- Chapter Four
- Chapter Five
- Epilogue
- Glossary of Key Terms
Fieldwork of Empire examines the impact of non-western cultural, political, and social forces and agencies on the production of British expeditionary literature. The book argues that such non-western impact was considerable, that it shaped the discursive and material dimensions of expeditionary literature, and that the impact extends to diverse materials from the expeditionary archive at a scale and depth that critics have previously not acknowledged. The book’s analysis is illustrative, not comprehensive. Each chapter targets intercultural encounters and expeditionary literature associated with a specific time period and African region or location.
The introduction sets the stage for this argument by providing a sketch of the history of the British Empire globally and in Africa during the period in question; an overview of nineteenth-century exploration culture; a discussion of the challenges involved in investigating non-western influences on European expeditionary discourse and literature; an interdisciplinary critical literature review; and an initial exposition of the argument followed by a chapter-by-chapter high-level summary of the book.
Chapter One uses David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels (1857) to consider wider British strategies of expeditionary discourse production during the mid-Victorian era. The chapter gives attention to the specific features that enabled Missionary Travels to be so effective as a public document, one by which Livingstone mapped the cultural and physical geography of Southern Africa in a way that responded to the sacred and secular desires of the British public. The chapter argues that Livingstone casts the region – previously the subject of myth and uninformed speculation – into a “very inviting field” (Livingstone 1857, 508) for the capitalist and missionary alike. South Central Africa, as Livingstone shapes it, abounds with idyllic and “fertile” lands, with indigenous populations predisposed to the institution of Christianity (especially the Makololo ethnic group), and with self-motivated individuals longing for the introduction of commerce.
Through such representations, Missionary Travels thus develops, suitably populates, and so overdetermines an ideal, interstitial site for British colonial intervention. Sustained analysis of the contours of this representation, in turn, helps illuminate broader British strategies of expeditionary discourse production during this historical moment and provides a bridge between previous Eurocentric criticism on Victorian expeditionary literature and the intercultural methodologies that this monograph will advance in subsequent chapters.
Chapter Two examines the cartographical work of the East Africa Expedition (EAE) (1856–59) in order to turn critical attention to the role of intercultural dynamics and non-western locations in shaping expeditionary literature. The chapter uses the work of the EAE to examine how published Victorian expeditionary texts could overwrite and so erase competing or recalcitrant non-western cultural and material realities while still developing in reaction to and out of those realities. The chapter suggests that East Africa’s extensive trading network, which extended from the island of Zanzibar far into the interior of the continent and relied on routes pioneered by Arab traders and the Nyamwezi ethnic group, facilitated the EAE’s survey work.
Yet, the chapter adds, this network also circumscribed the expedition’s potential “discoveries” and so compelled Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke, the leaders of the expedition, to turn to cartographical methodologies that they had sought to avoid by going into the field. The result – as best evidenced in the EAE’s four published maps of East Africa – was a reactive attempt by both Burton and Speke to erase the Arab-African basis of their cartographical statements (i.e., the foundational non-western material framework of these statements) by writing the narrative of the EAE over existing Arab-African material reality. In taking this approach, the chapter highlights the need for a new theoretical model of expeditionary discourse production, one that the next chapter will elaborate.
Chapter Three examines the impact of non-western forces and agencies in shaping, predetermining, and even overriding expeditionary discourse production at a foundational, field-based, generative level. To trace this impact, the chapter uses the work of Victorian explorer Samuel White Baker to develop two lines of analysis. First, the chapter elaborates a genealogy of the key intercultural encounters documented by Baker during his 1863–65 travels in southern Sudan and Bunyoro (present-day South Sudan and northwest Uganda, respectively). These encounters centered on Turco-Egyptian slave traders as well as the Banyoro and Baganda ethnic groups.
Second, the chapter reads the relevant segments of Baker’s unpublished diary alongside his published narratives in order to outline the impact of the encounters and of non-western cultural and material realities in which the encounters occurred on Baker’s texts. In doing so, the chapter develops a new multilayered, multidirectional model of expeditionary discourse production. This model has theoretical implications that extend far beyond any individual instance of intercultural encounter, as the next chapter demonstrates.
Chapter Four analyzes a series of late-Victorian intercultural encounters in Nyangwe, a small village in Central Africa. These involved David Livingstone, Verney Lovett Cameron, and Henry Morton Stanley, among others plus Arab slave traders and African ethnic groups such as the Luba and Lega. The chapter engages recent work on nineteenth-century African urbanization to consider how such urban history might be written with recourse to representations of Nyangwe in the expeditionary archive. The chapter highlights some of the issues inherent in using the archive for this purpose. The chapter diversifies the model of expeditionary discourse production previously introduced by using historical, anthropological, and linguistic scholarship to embed the relevant expeditionary literature within the local African and Arab contexts out of which that literature emerged.
Finally, the chapter uses this newly enhanced interpretive model to examine Victorian explorer representations of the Wagenya, an African ethnic group inhabiting the Lualaba River in the vicinity of Nyangwe, and to consider the broader role of this group in the development of Victorian colonial representations of Africa as a whole. In taking this approach, the chapter demonstrates how intercultural dynamics in a single location over a longer period of time could shape a range of expeditionary texts and so, ultimately, impact and overdetermine the production of what might otherwise seem the most self-directed of British imperial inscriptions.
Chapter Five’s discussion of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) considers the influence of literary conventions and historical events on Conrad’s representations of the Congo, but also uses Heart of Darkness to highlight the substantial impact that non-western forces and agencies can have on the production of fiction.
The chapter argues that Conrad constructed Heart of Darkness by deploying the conventions of two genres popular in the Victorian era (exploration narrative and conspiracy narrative), but that the discursive dissonance of these genres – most evident in Conrad’s use of the term “darkness” – itself takes shape from and, indeed, is fundamentally configured by cultural and material practices in the Congo Free State. The dissonance is also partly constituted by Conrad’s experiences in interacting with Belgian colonial administrators, the Force Publique of the Congo, and the diverse African ethnic groups settled along the Upper Congo River.
In developing this approach, the chapter opens a new dimension in the study of Heart of Darkness, while suggesting that the intercultural strategies of analysis developed in previous chapters for non-fiction expeditionary texts can likewise be applied to relevant fiction where representation grows out of on-the-spot experience.
The Epilogue begins by considering how the argument of the monograph evolves in an ever widening arc in terms of genres, time periods, and intercultural encounters. Yet despite this diversity, the epilogue adds, each of the chapters grounds its overall analysis with a sustained focus on the specific discursive and material circumstances related to a particular writer, expedition, or location. Each chapter also contributes to the development of the main theoretical model of intercultural influence by deploying a custom interdisciplinary methodology that responds to the given set of intercultural dynamics, the broader regional history of those dynamics, and the archival evidence available.
The epilogue continues by noting how the rise of digital humanities scholarship over the last few decades and the convergence of this scholarship with colonial and postcolonial studies is rapidly transforming the potential of scholars in studying archival documents, including expeditionary materials. The epilogue concludes by using the examples of Livingstone Online and a related initiative (the Livingstone Spectral Imaging Project) to suggest how the overall argument developed in the monograph might be enhanced and elaborated in future studies by engaging digital humanities research.
The Glossary of Key Terms defines and discusses a handful of important terms that appear throughout the book and play an essential role in the book’s arguments. These terms include the following: exploration, imperialism, colonialism, western/non-western, the field, and discourse. The definitions offered only scratch the surface of complex critical debates, but do provide a good sense of how these terms are used and understood in the book.