Real men /savage nature: British big game hunting in Africa, 1880--1914.

Abstract

This dissertation redefines the popularity and legacy of British big game hunting in the fin-de-siecle by analyzing the sport as an imperial institution, which is interpreted to mean one that was defined through its integration with both local and metropolitan cultures. To that end, it traces the varied transactions, relationships, and ideas that hunting engendered in Africa and Britain, ranging from hunters' dependence on local knowledge to the contemporary belief that Africa was locked in the Pleistocene. The resulting analysis challenges the scholarly assumption that imperial game hunting functioned primarily as a reification of elite authority and militaristic manhood. By examining both male and female hunters and their multifaceted relations with Africans, this dissertation illustrates that big game hunting in Africa encompassed a broad range of subjectivities that reflected notions of Britishness, modernity, and savagery, as well as ideas about imperial power and manliness. Moreover, I argue that it was the ability of hunting to encompass scenes of African power within a perceived framework of British superiority that made it such a powerful sign of imperial control. British hunters facilitated colonization both materially and symbolically, but this dissertation shows that Britons conceived of game hunting in Africa as occurring in a space that was extra-colonial, that is, as a space outside the pale of colonial 'civilization.' I further argue that the concern of both hunters and their metropolitan audiences to define the African natural landscape as something other than colonial repackaged the longstanding image of 'primitive' Africa into a form that was particularly attractive in the early twentieth century. By bringing colonial and metropolitan sources into conversation, this project offers a fresh perspective on several historiographies, including imperial power dynamics, British perceptions of African nature, and fin-de-siecle concerns about gender relations. In sum, by analyzing hunting as a vehicle that connected Britain to both the physical space and the imagined construct that was Africa, this dissertation recasts the resonance of imperial game hunting and reevaluates the trope of the white hunter, British understandings of imperial authority, and the imagined role of Western man in Africa's 'natural' landscapes.