Rhetorical Strategies of Narrating Yemen's History in Walter Harris's A Journey through the Yemen (1893)

Abstract

Walter Burton Harris was a British travel writer and Times correspondent who travelled extensively in Morocco for more than forty years, from his first entry to Morocco in 1886 until his death in 1933. Besides his journalistic reports, Harris published a number of travelogues during those years. By means of a close textual and critical analysis of the book’s strategies of narrating Yemen’s history, and inspired by David Spurr’s rhetorical study of journalistic and travel writing in his The Rhetoric of Empire (1993) and Edward Said’s analytical framework in Orientalism (1978), this article analyses Harris’s (re)production of Yemen’s history in his A Journey through the Yemen (1893). It shows how the author relies heavily on other authorities to negate Yemen’s history and to affirm his imperialist visions. The aim behind Harris’s book is, I argue, to provide a vision of Yemeni history that is, not to say distorted, extremely subjective and that aligns with his imperialist aspirations for a Yemen under European and, preferably, British control.