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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Fictionality and the Literature of Travel: The Narrative Imagination in Heinrich Barths Travels and Discoveries
Author:Bello-Kano, IbrahimISNI
Year:2001
Periodical:Humanities Review Journal
Volume:1
Issue:1
Pages:1-14
Language:English
Geographic terms:West Africa
Libya
Subjects:literary criticism
travel
History and Exploration
About person:Johann Christoph Heinrich Barth (1821-1865)ISNI
Abstract:In 1857 Heinrich Barth published his 'Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa'. It contains not only his own account of his journeys in Sudanic West Africa, but also detailed descriptions of the flora and fauna, languages, political history and important events of those societies between 1850 and 1855. Barth's text has become a canonical reference material for historians of 19th-century Sudanese societies. However, historical authorities have either ignored or failed to conceptualize adequately Barth's debt to the post-Enlightenment imaginary and its rhetorical apprehension of reality within representational and symbolic narrative. As the title of the text implies, there is a story of travel and observation organized around a central subject, and the text as a whole is this subject's story of the story of (his travels in) the Sudan. It is the union of event and action that gives 'Travels and Discoveries' a plot-structure. Narrativity (meaning-making) and textuality (writing) are interactively related. From the literary perspective, the study of Barth as a storyteller, a narrativist and an embellisher need not be any less instructive, profound or liberating than the study of Barth as a historian. Literary criticism should begin to engage with the whole range of cultural practices and textual organizations, not just narrowly fictional works such as novels and poems, in order to unmask all forms of colonial and dominatory discourse masquerading as scientific or disinterested knowledge. Only then can the literary critic demonstrate, and make sense of the historical, political, and literary effectiveness that textuality has had, and will continue to have, on the broad cultural, epistemological, and pedagogic fields. Bibliogr., ref., online sum. [Journal abstract]
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