Description
In this paper, I outline a framework for for reading humanitarian memoir as embedded in both the tradition of ethical witnessing and of adventure travel writing. Many critiques of humanitarianism have focused problematic ethical justifications for it, labelling them the ‘white man’s burden’ and the ‘white saviour complex’. However, while memoirs by humanitarian aid workers do reveal these dynamics, it is only part of the story. As Roth (2013) has noted, aid work is also a form of ‘edge-work’, or voluntary risk taking, and, as such, it is useful to also consider humanitarianism memoir as a form of adventure travel writing. This double lens allows for a more nuanced understanding of how the humanitarian social imaginary is built and sustained in and through the writings of its participants. Drawing on a range of humanitarian memoirs, focused predominantly in African contexts, I explore how the concept of witnessing, or témoignage, is central to the construction of a humanitarian identity in these memoirs. However, building on analysis that has highlighted the gendered nature of an imagined ideal aid worker (Read 2018), I argue it is important to understand the broader influences on the construction of aid worker identity, particularly by highlighting the commonalities with adventure travel writing. Works by Mary Louise Pratt (1992) and Debbie Lisle (2006; 2016) have highlighted the importance of travel writing for tracing colonial continuities in contemporary global political relations and I argue that humanitarian memoir must also be read in this tradition, particularly in its depiction of the African continent. This double reading of humanitarian memoirs reveals a humanitarian social imaginary in which an ethical ‘witness’ identity is re-produced in ways that reflect and reinforce existing racial and gender binaries in the humanitarian sector and upholds a supposed altruism at its heart in ways which deflect critique. Using the adventure travel frame to challenge this representation allows for a more complex understanding of the competing personal, political, spatial and ethical factors that shape humanitarianism as field of practice, as well as offering a more nuanced picture of humanitarianism’s colonial legacies and its relationship to its spaces of operation.
