Defining Travel by Susan L. Roberson

Author:Susan L. Roberson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2001-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

NOTES

1. John Barrow, An Account of Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa in the Years 1797 and 1798, 2 vols. (New York, 1968), 1:283–84 (the full description of the Bushmen runs sixteen pages); all further references to this work, abbreviated A, will be included in the text.

2. John Mandeville, The Book of John Mandeville, Hakluyt Society Series 2, vol. 101 (London, 1953), p. 138.

3. This genital fixation is still very much with us, especially as regards the Bushmen. See, for example, Laurens Van der Post’s popular Lost World of the Kalahari (New York, 1958).

4. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 1983), p. 35.

5. Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice, New Accents Series (London, 1980), p. 90.

6. Ethnographies would seem to be a counterexample to this claim, but in fact one can fairly easily show that ethnographic writing is inextricably tied to personal narrative. Indeed, this tie is a symptom of a serious contradiction between ethnographic methods and ethnographic discourse. See my “Fieldwork in Common Places,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George Marcus (forthcoming, 1986).

7. In 1795, the British took over the Dutch Cape Colony by force, on the pretext that it was in danger of being occupied by the French, who had just overrun Holland. George Macartney was appointed governor of the newly annexed colony; he took Barrow with him as his personal secretary. Appointed Macartney’s representative to the interior, Barrow made several lengthy journeys there to settle internal grievances between Boer settlers and Dutch colonial officials, to establish a sense of the British presence to both Boer and indigenous populations, and to begin documenting the geography of the interior, so far almost completely unmapped. He traveled, as was the customs by ox-drawn wagon, and relied for supplies, fresh oxen, and often lodging on the Boer settlers, who were required to provide such services for state representatives in exchange for powder and shot. The cape was returned to the Dutch in 1802 and retaken by the British in 1806. Barrow eventually succeeded Joseph Banks as head of the African Association (the same body that employed Mungo Park) and ended up much involved in polar exploration. See Christopher Lloyd, Mr. Barrow of the Admiralty: A Life of Sir John Barrow, 1764–1848 (London, 1970).

8. If such human landmarks are too many or too conspicuous, they must themselves be thematized in this discourse—for instance, as ruins or vestiges of some past civilization.

9. For more on this “monarch of all I survey” strategy, see my “Conventions of Representation: Where Discourse and Ideology Meet,” in Contemporary Perceptions of Language: Interdisciplinary Dimensions, ed. Heidi Byrnes, Georgetown University Roundtable in Languages and Linguistics (Washington, D.C., 1982), pp. 139–55.

10. David and Charles Livingstone, Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and its Tributaries; and of the Discovery of the Lakes Shirwa and Nyassa, r8s8-r864 (New York, 1866), pp. 101–2; all further references to this work, abbreviated N, will be included in the text.

11. Daniel

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