THE DIALECTIC OF THE FAMILIAR AND THE UNFAMILIAR - THE JUNGLE IN EARLY SLUM TRAVEL WRITING

This paper examines the widely used two-way metaphor of the 'jungle' i n its back-and-forth movement between imperial travel writing of the l ate Victorian period and early urban sociology and social reform. The analysis has two aspects: first, technologies of knowledge production such as mapping are shown to provide a common epistemological base for imperial and urban knowledges, secondly, the imagery of 'the jungle' is analysed. It is shown that the images produced in the writings of e xplorers such as Henry Stanley relied at least to some extent on analo gies to everyday problems of urban poverty and overcrowding, as well a s, more implicitly, on European masculine sexual fears about reproduct ion, growth and decay. This particular image of 'the African jungle' w as then re-imported into the discourse of urban social poverty and vic e, most memorably in the Salvation Army's In Darkest England and the W ay Out. The process analysed in this paper is not a unique discursive dynamic, it is argued, but is rather an instance of a common manoeuvre of cultural hegemony that can be called 'the dialectic of the familia r and the unfamiliar'.