Chapter 9 - Finding the Lost

Summary

Jessica Howell turns to an emblematic masculine figure: the explorer. Howell shows how Royal Geographical Society publications contribute to the imaginative construction of Africa within 1850s travel literature, and rhetorically create the need for further expeditions and exploration. These expeditions work hand-in-hand with the interests of the Empire, in extending and mapping its boundaries. Further, Howell highlights how the travel writing of Empire selectively appropriates local knowledge forms and occludes the suffering of the indigenous peoples who were co-opted to assist British explorers. This chapter demonstrates how one may read the archives of the Royal Geographical Society for both the discursive and physical forms of violence enacted upon local guides and servants. Howell draws upon the work of historians of gender and race to illuminate the ‘archival fragments’ (Fuentes) within the RGS materials, thereby reasserting the central role of African physical and intellectual labour to travel writing as a genre.