Agoraphobic travel? Mudimbe's Cheminements: Carnets de Berlin (avril–juin 1999)

Abstract

Assumptions regarding the form and content of travel writing mean this genre is widely understood to be structured according to the progressive stages of a journey and concerned primarily with actual topographies and cultural difference. In V.Y. Mudimbe's Cheminements: Carnets de Berlin (avril–juin, 1999), an unwillingness to conform to any of travel writing's usual conventions appears to exclude the text from any theoretical debate on this particular genre. However, this article argues that Cheminements has an invaluable role to play in critical processes that elaborate upon or interrogate commonplace understandings of travel and travel writing. In particular, Mudimbe's inattention to movement, distance and place suggest a rejection of a more widespread ‘agoraphilic’ standard of travel in favour of practices that allow for an entirely different encounter with the world.

Keywords:

• travel writing
• genre
• African travel writing
• tourism
• agoraphilic travel
• agoraphobic travel

Notes

Notes

1. ‘Fragments du royaume’, Pour une littérature voyageuse (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 1999), 119–40 (120).

2. V.Y. Mudimbe, Cheminements: Carnets de Berlin (avril–juin, 1999) (Quebec: Humanitas, 2006). Page references will henceforth be given parenthetically in the text.

3. V.Y. Mudimbe, Carnets d’Amérique, septembre–novembre, 1974 (Paris: Saint Germain des Près, 1976). For analysis of Mudimbe's American text, see my ‘“Alors, et l’Amérique?”: Post-Independence African Travel to the United States’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 45, no. 2 (2009): 129–39.

4. Bernard Dadié published three travel books which have all been translated into English: Un nègre à Paris (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1959), trans. Karen C. Hatch as An African in Paris (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Patron de New York (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1964), trans. Jo Patterson as One Way: Bernard Dadié Observes America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994) and La Ville o[ugrave] nulle ne meurt (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1968), trans. Janis A. Mayes as The City Where No One Dies (Washington: Three Continents Press, 1986). For more on Dadié's travel writing see Michael Syrotinski, Singular Performances: Reinscribing the Subject in Francophone African Writing (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002). Other African travel narratives include an account of a trip to Greenland by the Togolese traveller Tété-Michel Kpomassie, L’Africain du Grœnland (Paris: Flammarion, 1981), trans. James Kirkup as An African in Greenland (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2001 [1983]); and two epistolary accounts of journeys to the United States and Canada by Mudimbe's compatriot Zamenga Batukezanga, Lettres d’Amérique (Kinshasa: Zahat, 1982) and Chérie Basso (Kinshasa: Éditions Saint Paul Afrique, 1989). For a broader overview of African textualisations of travel see my Postcolonial Eyes: Intercontinental Travel in Francophone African Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009).

5. Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 10.

6. Mudimbe, Carnets d’Amérique, 11.

7. See Les Corps glorieux des mots et des êtres: esquisse d’un jardin africain à la bénédictine (Montreal: Humanitas, 1994).

8. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); The Idea of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).

9. Syrotinski, Singular Performances, 15, 24.

10. See Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, ‘V.Y. Mudimbe's “Long Nineteenth Century”’, in Postcolonial Thought in the French-Speaking World, ed. Charles Forsdick and David Murphy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), 136–46 (145).

11. I am thinking here of the work of sociologists Tim Cressell and John Urry who have referred respectively to the development of a ‘mobility turn’ and ‘mobilities paradigm’ in critical theory. See Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (London: Routledge, 2006), and John Urry, Mobilities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).

12. Charles Forsdick, Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Cultures: The Persistence of Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 161.

13. Mark Simpson, Trafficking Subjects: The Politics of Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xviii.

14. See Always Elsewhere: Travels of the Black Atlantic, ed. Alasdair Pettinger (London and New York: Cassell, 1998), and Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing, ed. Tabish Khair et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).

15. On this subject see Talking about Travel Writing: A Conversation between Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, Issues in English, 8 (Leicester: English Association, 2007).

16. Peter Hulme, ‘Deep Maps’, in Travel Writing, Form, and Empire: The Poetics and Politics of Mobility, ed. Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst (London: Routledge, 2008), 132–47 (132).

17. Malcolm Crick, ‘Representations of International Tourism in the Social Sciences: Sun, Sex, Sights, Savings and Servility’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 18 (1989): 307–44.

18. Jean-Didier Urbain, Ethnologue, mais pas trop (Paris: Payot, 2003), 189.

19. Hulme, ‘Deep Maps’, 133.

20. Hulme, ‘Deep Maps’, 137.

21. Roger Cardinal, ‘Romantic Travel’, in Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1996), 135–55 (135).

22. Michel Leiris, L’Afrique fantôme (Paris: Gallimard, 1981 [1934]), 225.

23. Nicholas Thomas, ‘Against Ethnography’, Cultural Anthropology, 6, no. 3 (1991): 306–22 (309).