Churchill and Roosevelt in Africa: Performing and Writing Landscapes of Race, Empire, and Nation.

During the months from October 1907 through March 1910, first Winston Churchill and then Theodore Roosevelt traveled through British East Africa on nearly identical routes. Both published a series of magazine articles and widely read books from their travels. At that time both were not only politicians but also popular authors who wrote and spoke on race, nation, and empire, and their travel accounts reflect these interests. This article analyzes the materials (visual, textual, published, and archival) produced from these travels to achieve two overarching objectives. One goal is to use these materials to understand how embodied encounters with and representations of imperial landscapes interact in mediating the performance of national and racial subjectivities. A second, more explicitly theoretical, purpose is to engage with the current “landscape debate” regarding representational and nonrepresentational approaches. Landscape's dual meaning as domain and scenery creates tension that can be productively explored through engagement with both representational and nonrepresentational approaches. I investigate how the tension between dwelling and scenery manifests in specific ways among different subjects in different contexts and reflect on what this might mean for integrating representational and nonrepresentational approaches to landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]