3 - Bringing the Empire Closer: Joachim Stocqueler's 'Route of the Overland Mail' as Archipelagic Asias in Theatre Historiography

Joachim Hayward Stocqueler (1801-1886) was a prolific traveller, journalist, writer, and theatre enthusiast. In 1850 Stocqueler produced two related accounts of the ‘Overland Companion’. The first one—Route of the Overland Mail to India: From Southampton to Calcutta—is a personal account of a long ship journey. Stocqueler’s voice in writing is enlivened by the sketches of landscapes such as Cintra, Gibraltar, Bay of Biscay, Malta, Cairo, Jeddah, Sri Lanka and finally, Calcutta. The second account—The Overland Companion—is a guide to the traveller embarking on a voyage to India via Egypt. Colonial ship journeys are often enigmatic reflections; both synchronous through the eyes of the voyager, and asynchronous in writing a historiography of theatre migrants. Landscapes and waterscapes come together in the liminal space of the ship or ship journeys to challenge our land-centric perceptions of disciplines. Hazel Andrews and Les Roberts (2012) have interrogated the remits of understanding liminality in this sense. In their interdisciplinary approach they find the interconnections of liminality and landscape through categories of space, place, and identity. How do such interconnections of liminality and landscape help us in writing histories of colonial archipelagic theatre histories? Do fleeting images from colonial steamers on sea resemble fleeting images from the theatre itself? Perhaps the accounts of the ‘Overland Mail’ to India from Britain and accompanying sketches help us probe such questions. More importantly, these accounts also become a prelude to the perceptions and practices of colonial migrant theatre-makers in understanding archipelagic Asias in performance histories.