Certificates of Presence: Authorial Portraits and the Orientalist Travelogue

As a form of writing, travelogues are first-person accounts that present a given place as seen through the eyes of a specific interpreter. With the advent of steam-powered locomotion in the nineteenth century, this genre experienced a marked shift. No longer limited to an aristocratic elite, long-distance travel was now in reach of a greater swath of society whose desire to show themselves as cultured made them eager to share their impressions of far-off lands.

Focussing primarily on travellers who wrote about Egypt and Japan, this paper proposes to explore the ways in which authorial portraits, frequently included as frontispieces at the beginning of travelogues, contributed to what Michel Foucault famously termed the “author-function” of a book. As the success or failure of Orientalist travelogues was frequently judged on the author’s ability to evoke a supposedly “authentic” vision of the East, writers needed to convince their audience not only that they had visited the foreign lands under discussion, but that they had engaged meaningfully with them. Attention will be dedicated to the performative nature and symbolic attributes of authorial portraiture, especially as these relate to the Victorian quality of “worldliness.” In particular, I will highlight the tendency for authors to portray themselves in foreign dress, partaking in what Marie-Cecile Thoral has dubbed “sartorial Orientalism.” Overall, the authorial portraits under discussion will be interpreted as “certificates of presence”—strategic tools used by the author to validate their written testimony as an eyewitness account.

Recording: https://youtu.be/71cBITmuHOE