Fieldwork of Empire, 1840–1900: Intercultural Dynamics in the Production of British Expeditionary Literature by Adrian S. Wisnicki (review)

In Fieldwork of Empire, 1840–1900: Intercultural Dynamics in the Production of British Expeditionary Literature, Adrian S. Wisnicki caps a long-running shift from a diffusionist, Eurocentric conception to a dialogic, cross-cultural model in the study of expeditionary writings. Where scholars once focused on the myth of the heroic Western explorer bearing European civilization into primitive terrae incognitae, critics since the 1980s have sought not only to reduce that great man to human proportions but also to recognize the contributions of Indigenous, non-Western agents to the process of exploration and the generation of expeditionary discourse. This change in focus is especially relevant to the study of those mid-nineteenth-century British expeditions into Central Africa led by David Livingstone, John Hanning Speke, and others who sought to discover the source of the Nile, suppress the African slave trade, promote Christian missionary work, and open up the African interior to capitalist enterprise. Seeking to consolidate recent advances in this area, Wisnicki provides an interpretive model that facilitates rigorous investigation, on the material and discursive levels, of the "multilayered, multidirectional process of intercultural interaction in the field" (12).

As this description implies, Wisnicki's model proposes an expansive inquiry into interchange between British explorer and African Indigene along two axes. It suggests, first, a study of the three layers, or stages, of writing produced by explorers during and after their expeditions, from field diaries to more reflective journals to published writings; and, second, an approach to intercultural exchange in expeditionary literature that brings together the different disciplinary directions (literary, historical, geographical, and ethnographic) from which that exchange has been examined. Deploying this model, Wisnicki offers a clear, capacious, meticulously researched and supported argument that shows not only the strong impress of European epistemologies upon the African continent, but also the unexpected (and sometimes highly determinative) influence of Indigenous African forces upon European mapping of and discourse about Central Africa. In most of his chapters, he applies this model to nonfictional writings generated by British expeditions in Africa. In his final chapter, however, he demonstrates the relevance of his method to a work of fiction—Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1898)—that derives its content from the author's on-the-spot experience in the African field.

Wisnicki's argument features three tensions that, to this reviewer, deserve further study. The first concerns the need to examine all extant expeditionary texts in (if possible) their three stages of composition—from raw field observations to more deliberately rendered journal entries to polished published accounts—to attain a proper estimation of their relative values. The African historian Roy Bridges, from whom Wisnicki borrows the idea of his multistage schema, presents a shifting view of the priority we ought to assign to these stages. In a 1987 article, Bridges argues implicitly for a balanced valuation of the writing generated at the three stages. In a 1998 article, however, he asserts that the first stage of production generally offers the most truthful record of the encounter between explorer and Indigene because it lies nearest in time to the original experience. Wisnicki embraces Bridges's latter position, arguing for the primacy of the raw record as reflecting the most unfiltered representation of the reality of the encounter: a reality that the more considered version of the published account sometimes distorts. Yet might not the raw material of the first stage, produced under the pressures of daily expeditionary life, display its own kinds of distortion, brought on by fatigue, illness, or emotional strain? Both Bridges and Wisnicki stress the importance of weighing all the available textual evidence, regardless of stage. This seems the wisest method to follow. By moving constantly among the various stages of writing and privileging none, scholars are more likely to arrive at the closest approximation to the truth of the encounter.

The notion of some...