Page - 137 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020

On the (Im)possibility of Writing a Travelogue; or, dimensions of polygraphy in Manuel João Ramos’s Of Hairy Kings and Saintly Slaves: An Ethiopian Travelogue (2018) Birgit Englert Abstract On his first journey to Ethiopia in 1999, the Portuguese anthropologist, essayist, and illustrator Manuel João Ramos resorted to drawing in order to capture his impressions of the rural and urban landscapes and people he encountered. Drawings carry the subjectivity of their creator within them; they cannot be mistaken for objective representations, as is often the case with photography. Ramos thus considers his sketches a less imperialist form of representation, one that allows him to overcome (at least partly) the limitations he experiences when trying to convey his travel experiences to others in words. Rather than functioning as mere illustrations of the written travelogue, his sketches can be understood as ‘texts’ of their own. In this contribution, I analyse the dimensions of polygraphy — a concept that refers to the re-writing of a formative travel experience in different formats — that can be found in Ramos’s Ethiopian Travelogue, which was published in English in 2018 as the revised translation of a book published in Portuguese in 2010, which itself was a revision of the first publication, also in Portuguese, from 2000. As I argue, the polyphonic dimension of Ramos’s work consists not only in his re-publishing sketches and texts based on his very first journey to Ethiopia, but in the lack of relation between the sketches and the text, an example of what we might call ‘internal polygraphy’. Keywords travel writing, polygraphy, sketches, anthropology, Africa DOI 10.25364/08.6:2020.1.9 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal, Vol. 6 2020, 137–154 Open Access: content is licensed under CC BY 3.0