Textuality, Empire, and the Catastrophic Assemblage: Sir Stamford Raffles and the Tambora Eruption

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the English-language account of the Tambora eruption produced under the auspices of the British Governor of Java, Sir Stamford Raffles. Scholars have treated this text as a straightforward account of the eruption and its effects, but it is in fact a complex heteroglossic and collaborative production in which different perspectives and knowledges intertwine and compete. ‘Tambora’, the chapter argues, is usefully understood as a material-discursive assemblage in which the natural and the political are thoroughly imbricated. These imbrications are addressed through a close analysis of Raffles's narrative in its three different contexts of publication over a fifteen-year period. The chapter shows, in particular, how the document supplants a mythic understanding of catastrophe with an imperalistic, ‘scientific’ epistemology.