The Scottish Picaresque, Surveying, and Socio-environmental Nexuses in Mungo Park's Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa

Many critics consider Mungo Park's travelogue of his trek into the interior of the African continent, in which he reaches the sought after banks of the Niger River in order to chart its course, as firmly espousing Romantic aesthetics and repeatedly imposing British ideologies on what he observes. His surveying and his deployment of the picturesque, for example, physically and imaginatively reshape the African continent. This essay argues that Park, a Scotsman, aligns himself with Black Africans through their shared positions as subordinates to hegemony. He does so in two primary ways. First, he adapts his surveying methods as he encounters peoples who practise it with much more nuance and precision, implicitly undercutting assumptions about European supremacy. Second, the Scotsman turns to an older genre, the picaresque, because it, by definition, not only defies the socioeconomic elite but also cherishes the places erased or subsumed by development. Displaced from his home, Park tries to create intimate affiliations across his travels, for his abject position requires him to reattach to—and, therefore, reanimate—his surroundings.