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Accepted Paper:
'Glamping' and 'Mission Creep' on Alexine Tinne's Nile Expedition of 1863-1864: Invoking current terms in narrating the colonial past, in order to help disrupt objectifying notions of moral distance.
Zachary Kingdon
(National Museums Scotland)
Paper short abstract:
Can we justify an assumption of moral distance from processes prevalent at colonial times? Do the objectifying terms we use to narrate colonial histories hinder our ability to acknowledge continuities and parallels in today's world?
Paper long abstract:
In 1863 Alexandrine Petronella Francisca Tinne (1835 - 1869), Alexine for short, equipped an extravagant expedition in order to follow the Bahr El Ghazal River with the aim of penetrating as far as Azande country in the Southern Sudan. World Museum Liverpool contains artefacts from the present day South Sudan that artefacts that were acquired on the expedition. Alexine represented her expedition, as a disinterested exercise in pleasurable tourism, yet the expedition itself and the collections that resulted from it were only made possible through dependence on the organized violence and slavery that underpinned the expanding infrastructures of travel, translation and trade in the Bahr el-Ghazal region at the time. The corruption embedded in nineteenth-century globalized capitalism and the brutal methods then employed by merchants in ivory extraction, have their parallels today. Can we justify an assumption of moral distance from processes prevalent at those times? Do the objectifying terms we use to narrate colonial histories hinder our ability to acknowledge continuities and parallels in today's world?