Imperial ambivalences. Histories of lady travellers and the french explorer octavie renard-coudreau (1867–1938)

This article addresses the life and works of a virtually unknown lady explorer, Octavie Renard-Coudreau (1867–1938), who continued an Amazonian exploration ‘alone’ after the death of her husband, the maverick French geographer Henri Coudreau (1859–1899). It extends and connects two main bodies of scholarship, the first on women travellers and feminist historical geographies, the second on scientific couples and collaborative partnerships in the history of sciences. I argue that, in addition to textual analysis, the social, biographical, cultural and political contexts of these travels allow a better understanding of the ambivalences that characterized Western travellers and scholars, both men and women, in imperial contexts. This helps avoiding essentialism and recovering the experiences of marginalized figures in the history of geography. The story of Octavie Coudreau has elements of originality that can stimulate new reflections on these points, also because her travel experience was not in the hegemonic Anglophone context, and she was acquainted with unorthodox and dissident geographers of that time. This article also contributes to studies on the influence which anarchist geographers such as Elisée Reclus, a supporter of the Coudreaus, exerted on explorers, though Octavie seemed to keep her distance from this former socialist inspiration.