"Performing Ethnicities: Richard Francis Burton’s Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah"

In this article, I discuss Burton as a traveller and a nomadic figure who constantly reinvented his identity by crossing and transgressing sociocultural and geographical boundaries. By performing multiple fictional personae from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds he explored from within different cultures at a time when Victorian England was governed by a state of axiological instability as the British imperial project was being challenged and redefined by new spaces of hybrid interaction between colonizers and colonized. I focus in particular on his pilgrimage to the holy cities of Medina and Mecca, which he undertook in 1853. I analyse the performative strategies that he used in constructing the figure of the male Muslim pilgrim and the ways in which he fictionalizes it in his well-known account, "Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El Medinah and Meccah" (1855–6), which was an editorial success among his Victorian readership.