Travel Writing for the Imperial Set

This week, Mary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation had me thinking back to some engravings I researched last summer, as an intern at the exhibit design firm, American History Workshop. I'd been tasked with tracking down images of the west coast of Africa from the fifteenth century, when Europeans and Africans began exchanging copper bracelets for ivory, and fine linens for pepper. When I found the work of Dutch geographer, Olfert Dapper, I thought I was home free: here were enticingly detailed images of African coastal cities, just the kind of engraving that would help a museum visitor understanding the developed, far-reaching trade networks between Africans and Europeans.

Loango, from Olfert Dapper’s, Description de lÁfrique. The full text of a later edition of Dapper's masterwork is available online through the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

There was just one problem. In all likelihood, Dapper didn't produce the illustrations, his publisher, Jacob Van Meurs did. And recent scholarship makes it quite clear that it's unlikely that Dapper traveled to Africa, and almost impossible that Van Meurs ever set foot out of Europe. The images were drawn by a man who could only imagine the scenes another man had compiled from second- or third-hand sources. I could of course recommend the use of the engravings in the exhibit – which I ultimately did – and suggest that they be presented as evidence of how Europeans imagined Africa. But the images could not be used, by any stretch of the imagination, as a representation of what Africa really looked like as the foundations of the trans-Atlantic slave trade were being laid. The engravings, if they tell us anything, give us insight into the imagination of a seventeenth century Dutch printer, or the conventions of engravings from the period. They don't tell us much about reality of city life in Loango, or the conditions at the fort, El Mira.

Pratt's Imperial Eyes places European travel literature in a similar frame. Drawing on texts from the 1730s through the 1980s and chronicling European's travels in Africa and South American, Pratt argues that travel writing helped Europeans to develop a conquerable understanding of “the rest of the world” and its peoples. European travel writing is, according to Pratt, not a dependable account of voyages and places seen, but instead a way of understanding how imperial visions of the world developed. Pratt notes in her introduction, “Important historical transitions alter the way people write, because they alter peoples' experiences and the way people imagine, feel, and think about the world they live in.” As early as the 1730s, the moment of people, capital, and materials required a new way of thinking and being in the world, and in turn influenced the way Europeans wrote about their encounters far from home.

Reading Pratt in 2012, it's easy to lose sight of why her work was so important when it was first published. Pratt's starting premise - that travel writing reveals more about the European author than the native subjects and geographies – seemed obvious, at least to this English-major-turned-historian. Of course travel writing was a critical tool in defining the world that European imperialists conquered. But in 1992, when the first edition of Imperial Eyes was published, scholars simply weren't taking such an approach to travel literature. As Pratt reminds us in her introduction, some historians and literary scholars took accounts of native people and distant lands at face value, using them as evidence in accounts of the conquerers or even the peoples and places they depicted. Alternately, some literary scholars approached travel writing as a text through which the existential crises of European explores could be understood. Nobody, it seems, was thinking about how travel writing helped create “the rest of the world” for Europeans, or the way such texts positioned that world in relation Europeans themselves.

Eighteenth-century travel writing by Europeans, about non-European places, erased native people, places, and ways of knowing from the landscape, and framed new territories as uninhabited and ready for conquest and capitalistic improvement. Nineteenth century writers adopted a more reciprocal, but no less imperialist view of native people, which Pratt describes using the term “anti-conquest.” Instead of eliding native people from the landscape, writers like Mungo Park positioned themselves as trading partners on equal footing with the South Africans they encountered, but nonetheless paved the way for the colonial capitalists. In South America, parallel travel writing by Alexander von Humbolt portrayed the landscape as filled with fabulous flora and fauna, but practically no human inhabitants. Later writers saw that landscape as ripe for development and improvement.

Pratt incorporates gender into both her analysis of writings about Africa and South America, noting that while both European men and women crafted travel writing that supported imperialism, they wrote about colonial situations and imperial projects differently. European women in South America, for example, emphasized the role of European women in providing a haven of domesticity.

James Buzard's 1993 review essay, which considers the first edition of Imperial Eyes suggests the broader importance the study for feminist historians of imperialism and colonialism. Buzard argues that the conception, whereby travel writers both sought reciprocity with the colonial subjects they encountered and promoted the imperial project, is a critical tool for understanding the place of Victorian women travel writers. The “anti-conquest” stance allows feminist historians seeking to restore the agency of women in colonial contexts without eliding their complicity in the imperial project.

Museum visitors may not yet be ready to confront the complicated history of a visual image that seems to, but yet cannot possibly, provide an accurate portrayal of bustling West Africa coastal cities. The scholarly community, on the other hand, has embraced Pratt's new way of seeing travel literature.