ABSTRACT
This study presents a literary critical paradigm for the study of
Heinrich

Barth's monumental exploration (or travel) narrative of the Western
Sudan. The

literary approach is intended to fill in a missing gap in the canonical
historical

approaches to Barth's narrative. The study argues that Barth's empirical
-

descriptive technique is, in the last analysis, a literary-aesthetic
device for the

expression of the unfamiliar, the exotic and the threatening Other. The
study also

demonstrates that Barth's text, which has enjoyed great prestige within
historical

studies on account of its assumed factual reliability and logical and
referential

meaning, is an instance of aesthetic-rhetorical writing, and not
historical biography.

A close reading of Travels and Discoveries shows that Barth's
"historical" moments

are paradigmatically and causally literary and rhetorical moments,
because the text's

production of the real, such as the description of landscapes,
mountains, rivers, and

bodies inheres within the intersection of aesthetic, historical,
metaphorical,

geographical, and ecological discourses over which the writer-explorer
has no

absolute control. This study undermines the mainstream historical
assumption of a

distinct historical, as opposed to a "literary" Barth through the
deployment of a

problematic which conceptualizes Barth's textual practice as the
coherent yet

unstable unfolding of a Baconian-Romantic literary tradition in which
the objects of

visual perception are apprehended within the spheres of "metonyrnic
observation"

and of "creative imagination".

The study thus contends that Barth's "historicism" is a narrativizing
and

representational strategy which discloses the Other both as a plot
structure within the

aesthetic and narrativist rhetoric of 19th

century ideology of the civilizing mission,

and as a subject for the pleasure and marvel of the reading publics of
the meaningmaking

projects of mid-19th

century European Imperial cultures.

The study consists of seven chapters and an Appendix which contains

Barth's lithographic engravings of some Sudanese scenes. Chapter One
explores, in

broad strokes, Barth's heritage within the rhetorical culture of
Renaissance travel

writing, and the universalizing will to absolute knowledge of the Post
Enlightenment. It was this heritage that created the historical and
discursive

conditions of the modern European will to power, and which in turn
produced the

modern genre of exploration writing. The chapter also sets out the
scope,

delimitation, objectives, justification, and theoretical framework of
the study.

Chapter two contains a review of the historical literature on Barth and
his book,

such as biographies and scholarly books and articles by historians and

anthropologists who have dominated, until recently, studies of
exploration literature.

The chapter also reviews recent works by literary critics and
textualists on travelexploration

literature in order to keep abreast with the state of research, the

paradigmatic and new interest in this new and expanding research field. A
select

review of related literature on narrativity (narrative and narration),
and historical

and symbolic representation was also undertaken. The principal arguments
of the

chapter are that it is needless to insist that the literary critic and
the historian should

bridge the gap between literary and historical texts. This is because
there is no such

divide. Any "historicalization" is necessarily and inescapably a
function, instance,

and play of narrativization, a meaning production or narrativity.

Chapter Three investigates the cultural and political rhetorics that
have

animated the reading and interpretation of Barth's influential narrative
of the

Western Sudan. Its central arguments are that Barth's Narrative was not,
as the

conventional academic wisdom assumes, written in the spirit of
disinterested,

scientific scholarship. Rather it is made to appear such by the
rhetorical interpretive

operations of its reading publics such as the Geographical Society, the
leading

periodicals, Lord Frederick Lugard, and academic historians such as
Shultze, KirkGreene,

Hodgkin, Ayandcle, Adeleye, and Usman, among a host of others. These

reading publics or formations are themselves governed, like Barth's text
itself, by a

specific set of more or less contradictory cultural and political
rhetorics; and that

these rhetorics still under-determinc the contemporary reception of
Barth. The

chapter substantiates the contention that Barth's Narrative does not
possess any

intrinsic meaning-effects of its own, but those of its veritable reading
or interpretive

communities within a process of "productive activation".

Chapter Four examines Barth's literary strategies of presence, his
visualist

and objectifying model of the gaze. It offers an analysis of Barth's
desire for

plenitude in the form of his self-representation within arrival and
departure scenes,

and of gift-giving, linguistic and cultural appropriation of the
indigenous life-ways.

The subject of analysis in Chapter Five is the text's strategies of the
representation

of the indigenous landscape and body. It shows that far from registering
the

immediate presence of the local space, Barth's text only symbolizes it,
that is,

transfers or "translates" it from a concrete to a symbolic structure.
Chapter Six is

concerned with Barth's deployment of narrativity, the configuration of
the events

into the plot structure of beginning, middle, and end, complete with a
central subject

and a narrativist consciousness; and how narrativity both configures and
disconflgures

Bath's own textual-narrativisl appropriation of native space. Chapter

Seven concludes the study and brings out the implications of Barth's
overall oeuvre.

It argues that although Barth prepared the way for Christian
missionaries and

colonial adventurers in Travels and Discoveries, writing is at the
centre of his text,

and that beyond and behind his text is an infinite productivity of the
sign. The

implication is that those referents or presences that the text names
have always

existed, and can exist only, as traces, supplements, and substitute
significations.