Travel Writing and Diasporic Spaces

7/27/2019 Travel Writing and Diasporic Spaces

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TRAVEL WRITING AND DIASPORIC SPACES: animal representation in

travel and tourist texts

Although discourses on travel and diaspora are traditionally anthropomorphic in

concern, animal migratory patterns, transportation and hunting of animals have played

significant roles in travel acts and texts throughout the centuries. In the 19 th century,

explorers, hunters, colonists, missionaries and naturalists transported animal

specimens - dead or alive - from the colonies to the home country. Simultaneously,

European animals were exported to the colonies. Such exchanges were motivated by

what Helen Tiffin terms normative European ideas. These took the form of either a

nostalgia for European plants animals and landscapes, or an impulse fostered by

various Acclimatisation societies to distribute the good things of the earth throughout

the world (Tiffin 2007:xviii-xix).

In this paper I intend to focus on journeys in which wild animals are central to the

travel narrative either through dislocation from their original contexts, or as a basis

for cultural and economic exchange. Central this account is the manner in which

human-animal relations are expressed through the gaze. By tracing its role from 19 th

colonial narratives to present day wild life tourism in Southern Africa I intend to show

what has remained constant and what has changed in the complex construction of the

gaze.

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During the nineteenth century the interior of the African continent became an

increasingly important source of animal specimens for scientific exploration and

education. Of course these expeditions driven by imperial narratives of domination

and power, and their numbers increased exponentially through the nineteenth century.

During the first decade of the C20th a new form of expedition emerged when US

President Theodore Roosevelt unwittingly established the prototype for safari tourism.

He commissioned taxidermist CarlAkeley to undertake the first of what became

many visits to Central Africa to acquire specimens for the American Natural History

Museum. These expeditions were justified in the name of science and conservation,

but were fuelled by Roosevelts passion for adventure, glory and posterity. This

narrative conjoined with American visions of manhood and the preservation of

heritage.

Carl Akeley is today best known his contribution to the art of taxidermy, but in his

desire to produce life-like specimens for his large scale dioramas, he also improved on

existing film making techniques with the aim to use film as an educational research

tool. (Haraway 1984-85:38). These scientific expeditions were followed by others

such as the Johnsons popular safari movie trips, which together with other hunting

and photographic expeditions created the rhetorical models for contemporary tourist

wildlife safaris.

Historian Hilda Keane observes that in early C19th Europe gazing upon living

creatures was an act of potential moral upliftment which could affect human

behaviour for the better. The emphasis on sight, and as Keane explains, the witnessing

of perceived cruelty and injustices towards animals became a key feature in

campaigns for animal protection in the Western world (Kete: 2007:28-29). In early

C20th Africa animals which had been hunted almost to extinction began to become

objects of this manifestation of the gaze. It is my belief that sentiments which

previously related only to domesticated animals began to be extended to the act of

gazing upon wild animals: animals formerly hunted now became objects of the gaze.

But as John Urry notes, such gazes cannot be left to chance (2005:10): gazing is a

complex process, sometimes akin to the experience of the pilgrim and could involve

elements of the sacred and the liminal (Urry 2005:10-11). As is commonly known

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Urry derived the term tourist gaze from Foucaults medical gaze in his writings on

the clinic. The tourist gaze is associated not simply with holiday scenes and

snapshots, but with pleasure and the consumption of uncommon commodities all

activities which in some way or another differ from the humdrum of everyday life. An

important part of such experiences is to gaze upon a set of different scenes or subjects

which are (as yet) unfamiliar to the tourist. The tourist gaze is constructed and

developed by many different forms of specialist profession, but an investment in the

Other is common to all of them (Urry 2002:1).

Colonial narratives relegated the cultural other to the status of the noble savage who

needed to be civilised, yet whose primitiveness was also simultaneously admired.

Implied here is a quest for authenticity - a longing for the world and experiences of

the pre- industrial traveller. Mannoni notes that in European writing on Africa,

the savage is identified in the unconscious with a certain image of the

instincts. And civilized man is painfully divided between the desire to correct

the errors of the savages and the desire to identify with them in his search for

some lost paradise or authenticity (a desire which at once casts doubt upon the

merit of the very civilization he is trying to transmit to them (cited in

Nederveen- Pieterse, 1992 37-38).

According to John Frow the construction of a cultural other is integral to the

development of tourism in post-industrial society (1991:129). Even though lives of

animals in the wild are harsh and unromantic, most tourists associate gazing upon

animals with a restful and fulfilling experience -being close to nature. Most

contemporary game reserves construct their advertising material so that they are

perceived as ideal arenas for viewing this cultural other.

In the light of these phenomena the allure of observing wild animals in areas of

relative wilderness can be described as one of the most desired tourist narratives - that

of fulfilling a desire for authenticity being out of time and out of place- which feels

realas opposed to the constructedand managed. All these attributes combine to

alleviate what Davis calls the narrative shortage of contemporary tourist industries.

(1999:189)

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animal representation they have encountered at home through wildlife documentaries,

brochures and other advertising media.

The following popular tropes of representation have been identified as these appear in

tourist literature such as brochures, advertisements, guidebooks, coffee table books

and the web:

The charismatic, iconic animal

The animal as subject of the gaze

The hunt (between animal predator and prey)

Family animal groupings

Eco-hunting-where hunters are photographed with their trophies.

These subjects cover, as Sontag claims, photographic acquisition in several forms

(1977:155). One of these possessions constitute a consumers relation to events and

experiences: photographs become part of system of information fitted into schemes

of classification and storage (Sontag 1977:156) which blurs distinctions between

information and experience but which the tourist perceives as being authentic.

There is a bi-fold perception to this sense of authenticity: firstly, authenticity is

experienced as something akin to veneration and yearning. Current tourist practises

have been compared to pilgrimages- a hard won journey in which the traveller-or in

this case tourist-has travelled a great distance which culminates in a spiritually

rewarding experience. This process of sacrilization is also recognized by Urry as

important to the romantic tourist ritual. (2005:10).

According to Sax (2007:31) in his essay Sacred and symbolic animals in the era of

change something close to veneration implicit in the very concept of animals are

enveloped in mystery akin to religious fascination. Furthermore, the notion that

animals might be sacred has a long history and one that has become a guiding force in

the environmental movement the latter which can be described as inclining towards a

totemic, even pagan, perspective on animals (Sax 2007 38-39).

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The second component arises from a belief which I wish to refer to a an Ur-

experience- that somehow post-industrial societies have lost contact with animals and

nature. Few city dwellers are exposed to animals in their daily life unless it is via

media or in the form of pets ownership. The personalised game safari provides an

opportunity to revisit such roots and re-establish a link with lost nature. In tourist

settings and media publications dealing with wild animals the animal is represented

as the ultimate Otherunselfconscious and in harmony with nature - thereby promising

the sought after, authentic urexperience.

Authenticity is an entirely post modern value which needs to be sustained primarily

through the semiotics of nostalgia (Frow quoting MacCannell 1991:129-130). Urry

notes that, the seventeenth century disease of nostalgia seems to have become a

contemporary epidemic (2002:95) and that especially private initiatives have

inspired new ways of representing history, through commodifying the past in novel

forms.

Whereas the colonizer in the 19th century sought to translate alien territory and its

components into familiar spaces or products which reflected them psychologically

and metaphorically, the late 20th and early 21st century South African wildlife

advertising and tourist industries seek to construct a glamorous fictionalisation of a

harsh colonial past sourced from cinematic history.

What is being signified in the early movies is a glamorisation of the hunt, the thrill of

animal kill and exoticism. The notion of the animal as spectacle, wherein hierarchical

power structures between the animal and the human being are clearly defined, not

only links to current game viewing platforms and its commonality with the viewing

station of Picturesque tourism, but also to the colonial gaze with regard to human

beings. As a result, rapacious global tourism (Urry 2002:60) emulates trends

established in colonial times and recognizes the enduring (market) need for new and

exotic experiences(Urry 2002:60).

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Furthermore, the social disease of nostalgia translates into a twofold metaphoric

relationship to travel- on the one hand there is a yearning for the heimatwhich is seen

as a safe haven to return , on the other, a yearning for a lost origin or sense of

authenticity which is sought in an industrialised world removed from animals and

nature (Frow 1991:Urry 2002:135).

Finally and in addition to nostalgic yearning a new animal narrative with its roots in

diaspora and colonialism has evolved in the late 20 th and early 21st centuries - the

narrative of extinction. Major tourist drives revolve around not only the quest for so

called authentic experiences (or rather the staging of authenticity) but the knowledge

that some of the animals to be gazed upon are either in threat of imminent extinction

or already extinct in their natural habitats. Urry identifies stewardship and

conservation of heritage as one of the four patterns of consumption with regard to the

environment in contemporary tourism. Perhaps constructed perceptions of animals

and their habitats will be the sole future arenas in which the existence of certain wild

animals can be assured.

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Travel Writing and Diasporic Spaces

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