Imagining Africa: Landscape in H. Rider Haggard's African Romances, and: Diary of an African Journey: The Return of Rider Haggard (review)

Imagining Africa: Landscape in H. Rider Haggard's African Romances, by Lindy Stiebel. Westport: Greenwood, 2001. xv+155 pp. ISBN 0-313-31803-4 cloth.

Diary of an African Journey: The Return of Rider Haggard, by H. Rider Haggard, ed. with Introduction and Notes, by Stephen Coan. Washington Square: New York UP, 2001. xiii+345 pp. ISBN 0-8147-3631-9 cloth.

The imperial agenda was mainly about conceptions of space and power, thus mapping and explorations of the colonial space were premised on the logic of an often male European Master assuming an unmediated access to the "untamed wildness" of the often docile feminized Subject of the Victorian universe. The function of landscape in providing both a historical and geographical context and also a space for the desires and anxieties of the Victorian writer is well explored in Lindy Stiebel's Imagining Africa, a study that re-presents Haggard's adventure stories as writings within the agenda to reconstruct and reorder the African landscape along imperial imagining. Stiebel's thesis is on the representation of land and the discourse of manifest and latent Africanism, the physicalization and sexualization of Africa according to the tension between the writer's desire and fear. It is the first sustained piece of work on Haggard's treatment of landscape in his African romances. Stiebel conceives her work as a sexual exploration of the African continent by the imperial adventurer, a description Haggard subscribes to in his Diary of an African Journey: The Return of Rider Haggard.

In his writing, Haggard manipulates fact and fiction to generate mystery while perpetuating the existing imperial ideas in spite of his ambivalence toward the colonial agenda. In Imagining Africa, Haggard's African topography comes under close scrutiny: his vast Eden—paradise, virginal and unpenetrated by any human before his Adam and Eve characters; the wilderness— nature and alienated heart of darkness (negative ideal) as opposed to civilization (positive ideal); his dream underworld that sucks you in and spits you out into vast subterranean rivers that lead to mysterious wealth acquired by hands unknown, but that are not related to the Africans and his sexualized landscape.

Naming, mapping, and classifying are part of the growing manifest discourse of Africanism (as indeed they were of imperial expansionism), and one of the appeals of Steibel's study is that it does not mire the reader in intricate theoretical concepts and postcolonial terminologies. She explores Haggard's romances and deploys her argument with the texts as primary source. She exposes the fears and the images inscribed on the minds of Haggard and his imperial readers. Haggard maps these images in his romances—the silences, the empty spaces, the positional enhancements, the representational hierarchies, and land as Subject to be penetrated and used and devoured and violated. Though he follows the imperial "order," his Diary presents an ambivalent wish to make atonement.

The Diary is a recollection of views and impressions that Haggard held during his last visit to Africa in 1914 as a member of the Dominions Royal Commission set up in 1911 to examine the role that Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa could play in the consolidation and furtherance of the British imperial endeavor. The Diary provides a refreshing discursive moment and a "context" for postcolonial studies. Indeed, it reads like a postscription for Haggard's romantic views, highlighting the thought processes that inform the topographical logic behind the novels. It presents a mirror that reflects the imperial world that Stiebel analyzes in Imagining Africa.

Stiebel details the discursive colonial space of land representation and the ways in which the romances become part of the building blocks for the production of colonial and postcolonial subjectivities by constituting and constraining what could be enunciated within their discursive space. Stiebel shows how...