Reinterpreting Exploration

Reviews / Votes

This important book critically re-evaluates what Western exploration was and did - its intellectual contours and its enduring consequences -and wonderfully illuminates exploration's multiple histories, diverse geographies, and material forms. Regional essays on Russia, the Pacific, Eastern Africa, Central Asia, and Antarctica are paralleled by thematic attention to exploration and science, commerce, Enlightenment, print culture, and empire. Elegantly replacing unwarranted hagiography with critical historiography, national narratives with cross-cultural perspectives, the essays in Reinterpreting Exploration at once demythologize and reinvigorate debates on the West's role in the world and the world's impact upon the West. * Charles W.J. Withers, University of Edinburgh * Reinterpreting Exploration: The West in the World...marks an important moment in an ongoing reassessment of the European project of exploration. Looking simultaneously backwards and forwards - tracing the development of current research avenues and gesturing towards new lines of enquiry? - the book investigates the 'epistemological foundations' and 'ideological agendas' of expeditionary culture and the resulting encounters with non-European peoples and places around the globe. Since popular literature persists in writing the history of exploration as the story of heroic and individualistic pioneers, this book provides a much-needed antidote.... Kennedy's collection has commendable chronological length, regional breadth, and thematic depth. * Justin D. Livingstone, Journal of Historical Geography *