Dissonant notes, intrepid explorers: a reading of Angola and the River Congo, by Joachim John Monteiro, between ecology and violence

Abstract

Over the course of the 19th century, several campaigns in African territories led by white European or North-American scientists, explorers, entrepreneurs, or military officials have been transposed into travelogues where different stages of imperialism and colonialist presences are portrayed. While most of the approaches to these writings tend to favor a post-colonial framework for the interpretation of the interactions depicted there, it is also possible to employ a critical apparatus modeled after the recent developments in the field of the environmental humanities. In this essay, I discuss how Slavoj Žižek’s contributions to the debates around the ideas of nature, ecology, and global capitalism have the potential to deepen our understanding of colonial regimes of oppression, serving as a powerful (if also nuanced and provocative) tool to explore processes of world-making involved in the imperial projects developing over the course of the 19th century. To do so, I propose a close reading of several instances of the travel book Angola and the River Congo (London, 1875), by Joachim John Monteiro, focusing on the entanglements between the human and non-human agencies, vegetable landscapes and extractive transnational economies, and the articulation of racism and scientific projects in the Angolan territory.