ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the way echotourists take up anachronistic figures of the traveller received from the journeys they re-enact. Drawing on Judith Butler’s concept of citationality, it argues that re-enacting gendered identities from the past requires elaborate and sometimes unstable performances. In Chapter 4, I compare two narratives of African travel by Tim Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart (2008) and Chasing the Devil: On Foot Through Africa’s Killing Fields (2011). The former re-enacts H.M. Stanley’s Through the Dark Continent (1878), and the latter takes Graham Greene’s Journey Without Maps (1936) as a template. Butcher is preoccupied with the figure of the hardy, robustly masculine African explorer and, by citing Stanley, he is able to perform it in Blood River in a way he finds satisfying. In Chasing the Devil he attempts to present Greene through the same model of masculinity. However, Greene proves a problematic model of masculine agency, and Butcher must bring Journey Without Maps to bear on his own travels in shifting and surprising ways. Ultimately, his attempt to draw upon Greene to celebrate a rugged masculinity reveals how contingent and complicated the performance of masculinity can be.
