Reviews
Dane Kennedy, Review. Journal of Victorian Culture 25:3 (July 2020): 468-70.
- “It is rare to read a work as rigorously interdisciplinary in its methods and objectives as Adrian Wisnicki’s Fieldwork of Empire. Making skillful use of evidence and insights from African history (including oral history), anthropology, cartography, historical geography, and literature, this is a work that defies disciplinary categorization. Although the author holds a PhD in English, teaches in an English department, and addresses issues related to ‘expeditionary literature,’ as announced in the subtitle, he has written a book that is relevant and revealing to scholars in a variety of fields.”
Laura Franey. Review. Review 19 (2020).
- “This book offers precisely the kind of dense, complex, intercultural reading of Victorian travelers, their journeys, and their literary and cartographic productions that scholars of travel writing on Africa have envisioned since the boom in such criticism began in the late 1980s and early 1990s.”
John McBratney, Review. Victorian Studies 62:3 (Spr. 2020).
- “Wisnicki offers a clear, capacious, meticulously researched and supported argument that shows not only the strong impress of European epistemologies upon the African continent, but also the unexpected (and sometimes highly determinative) influence of Indigenous African forces upon European mapping of and discourse about Central Africa.”
Jared McDonald. Review [download link] Historia 64:2 (2019).
- “Fieldwork of Empire complements new studies of indigenous interactions with and responses to the colonial imposition, which are increasingly highlighting the global, national and local agencies, participants and audiences which were integral to the production of identities, spaces, material cultures, archives and ‘knowledge’ in and of Africa during the nineteenth century. [...] Wisnicki manages to weave together an insightful tapestry of the human influences that contributed to the making of Victorian expeditionary literature of Africa, illuminating the neglected, but the fundamental role of local, non‐Western individuals and populations in dynamic processes of exchange and contestation.”
Edward Armston-Sheret. Review. Journal of Historical Geography (2019).
- “The broader insights generated by this comparative approach are precisely what makes the book a must-read for historical geographers working on the history of travel, exploration and empire.”
Guillaume Didier. Review. Société d’Étude de la Littérature de Voyage du Monde Anglophone (2019).
- “Fieldwork of Empire […] provides powerful arguments in favour of the need to ground new studies of Victorian exploration in local contexts, to the extent that the relationship in the field between British explorers and ‘subalterns’ can be reconsidered and general assumptions about intercultural encounters can be challenged.”