Visualizing Africa in Nineteenth-Century British Travel Accounts (review)

Leila Koivunen’s study makes an impressive contribution to the growing body of critical work on Victorian travel writing. In eight meticulously researched chapters, Koivunen traces the production of illustrations for Victorian travel and exploration narratives focused on Africa, from the initial sketches created by travelers while still in the field to the complex series of revisions both in Africa and Britain that transformed these sketches into their final published versions. In fact, Koivunen’s single most important critical contribution lies in her ability to demonstrate that, despite claims of authenticity, “travel-book illustrations . . . were neither exact documents of what travellers had witnessed nor of what they had recorded by visual means,” but rather “were the result of a long construction process, which, in many respects, resembled the editing of texts for publication, but included an even greater variety of different stages and persons” (206).

In making this argument, Koivunen engages several strands of critical thought. First, she enters a long-running discussion that explores the relationship between images of Africa and the European cultural contexts from which those images emerged. This discussion extends from classic studies like Philip D. Curtain’s The Image of Africa (1964) and H. A. C. Cairns’s Prelude to Imperialism (1965), to more recent work by Jan Nederveen Pieterse and Annie E. Coombes, to scholarship by James R. Ryan and Roy Bridges focused specifically on nineteenth-century explorer images. Second, Koivunen builds on research in book history that examines the role of the production process in shaping published narratives. In particular, Koivunen enters an ongoing debate among scholars such as Bridges, Dorothy Helly, I. S. MacLaren, Tim Youngs, David Finkelstein, and the present author regarding the value and significance of the many stages of travel writing, from raw diaries, letters, and field maps, to formal publications including periodical articles and popular travel accounts. Finally, Koivunen’s monograph also examines the ideology of intercultural representation, a topic of concern in numerous works, from seminal texts like Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and V. Y. Mudimbe’s The Invention of Africa (1988) to many subsequent studies of travel writing.

Yet Koivunen’s emphasis on the visual dimension of Victorian travel narratives, particularly field sketches and professional wood engravings, distinguishes her work from previous scholarship focused on written discourse. In her study, Koivunen examines seventeen illustrated first editions “for which some material or information on [the] illustration process is still available” by thirteen explorers (13), including key figures such as David Livingstone, John Hanning Speke, Samuel White Baker, and Henry Morton Stanley as well as lesser-studied travelers like Charles John Andersson and James Chapman. The sweep and specificity of Koivunen’s argument, furthermore, show that she has a notable talent for pulling together widely scattered archival references to produce persuasive interpretations of both individual images and the production process as a whole.

The monograph consists of two halves. In the first four chapters, Koivunen examines the initial field-based creation of images of Africa, and touches on a range of crucial subjects, from the influence of nineteenth-century European ideas of the continent in forming these images to the significance of preexisting ideals and practices of visual documentation. She also charts the impact of firsthand travel in Africa on these ideas and ideals. Through a series of compelling examples, she details the practical constraints that explorers faced—including temporal limitations, difficult environmental conditions, and problematic relationships with local African populations—and examines the means by which explorers compensated for these obstacles, most notably by deploying a “composite” sketching technique (54). She also develops a fascinating, amply illustrated account of how “contemporary European visual culture” influenced the images produced by explorers while still in the field (69).

In the latter part of her study, Koivunen tracks the many modifications imposed on explorers’ images for publication in Britain. She examines the role of generic conventions in this process and the influence—often indeliberate—of various parties, including...