Geography and Transoceanic Travel Writing

Abstract

JEMCS 3.1 (Spring/Summer 2003) Review Essay: Geography and Transoceanic Travel Writing Roxanne Kent-Drury Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography 1600-1830. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. 288 pp. $ 29.95 p/b. Rod Edmond, Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gaugin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 319 pp. $90. David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers, eds. Geography and Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. 455 pp. $25 p/b. Kate Ferguson Marsters, ed. Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa by Mungo Park. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. 415 pp. $21.95. The eighteen studies (books and essays) discussed in this essay collectively traverse roughly four hundred years of European travel and exploration. Geographically, they span oceans and continents, providing intersecting perspectives on what travelers saw and reported, both literally and figurative ly. True to the nature of travel itself, these studies form a multivalent web of correspondences that has temporal and spatial dimensions. At the same time, whether undertaken for scientific research, exploration, or leisure, the travel these studies analyze is intensely focused upon the local and par ticular. Moreover, regardless of discipline, all of the scholars these works represent are deeply concerned with both the his torical and rhetorical contingency of travel, space, and place. The fourteen essays in Geography and Enlightenment, edited by David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers, had their origin in a July 1996 conference at the University 148 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies of Edinburgh. Collectively, the authors explore the Enlightenment origins and manifestations of geography through the lens of postmodern humain geography; individ ually, the essays suggest new avenues for research in the deployment of Enlightenment spatial ideas and their impli cations to western European encounters with new people and places. Viewing "enlightenment geography" as a com plex of social constructs preoccupied with national and local conceptions of place and space, this important collection begins with an excellent survey of the literature document ing the Enlightenment conditions that gave rise to modern geography. The editors conclude that there was not one, but rather many enlightenments, and that in terms of geogra phy, Enlightenment should be understood and studied not only in its global, local, and border-crossing manifestations but also as its modifications are read back into European enlightenment cultures. Livingstone and Withers describe geography as both a "material and metaphorical enterprise" (14), and the authors of this collection are keenly aware of the "wider interest in the study of science as a sociad construction and a more recent 'recovery of geographical discourse' within the humanities and social sciences" (16). While geography has long been seen as a practical science that represented the unknown in realistic, systematic, scientific, and (conse quently) transparent and understandable terms, the cultur al assumptions underlying geographic disciplinary practice are among the most recent to be scrutinized by scholars such as those whose essays appear in this volume. Among the essays that provide important theoretical for mulations is David Livingstone's essay "Geographical Inquiry, Rational Religion, and Moral Philosophy: Enlightenment Discourses on the Human Condition." By exploring the implications of monogenetic and polygenetic theories about "human origins and racial variation" (93), Livingstone examines "how geographical motifs were pressed into the service of radically differing intellectual and political projects" (111). Livingstone shows that "the issue of human diversity, its cause, and consequence were part and parcel of geography's domain" during the Enlightenment, as evi denced by the discipline's location with the "Moral and Kent-Drury 149 Political Sciences" in the French National Institute from 1795 and 1803 (95). An example of polygenetic theorizing is Isaac de la Peyr?re's Relation du Groenland (1663), described as "a sustained effort to deploy arguments from geography, encompassing physical, demographic, linguistic, and cultur al evidence, to sustain his own suspicions about the inade quacy of th? traditional monogenetic story of the human race in favor of a polygenetic account* (99). By "polygenetic," the authors mean the idea that "human beings existed before Adam" (100), which suggests multiple origins for present day populations; by extension, polygenetic theories were used to...