Travel Writing, History and Colonialism: An Analytical Study (original) (raw)

Travel Writing and Colonial Consciousness: A Postcolonial Interpretation

Travel Writing has played a remarkable role in instilling colonial consciousness among the adventurers and explorers which ultimately paved the way for the beginning of imperialism and establishment of colonies in various parts of the world. The conceived space is translated into reality in the process. Ideas are being rendered by literature and implementation of the enterprise is done by the explorers and the colonisers to various resourceful but exotic lands around the world. Now travel and its documentation has been a continuous process undergoing different phases of its development from time to time.While the first phase of European colonial travel writing was characterised by a curiosity about the 'unknown', gradually it turned into a vision of world geography in the seventeenth century which asserted the centrality of Europe, specially of England in dauntless imperialistic manner. Travel, however, paves the way for cultural interchange among the conflicting people and out of their negotiations new equations of life are being created. Pratt's theory of transculturation thus talks about the absorption of dominant ideologies by the subordinates. Thus the present paper discusses the gradual development of travel writing since ancient age with its upsurge in nineteenth century, the role of women travel writers and particularly the contribution of this genre in generating and perpetuating colonial mindset followed by the vigorous colonial adventures in various far-flung areas of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Postcolonial theory has, in-fact, viewed travel and travel literature with their multidisciplinary connotation from a different angle of vision in which different postcolonial concepts of liminality and ambivalence also contribute their part.

TEXT Special Issue 56: RE-mapping Travel Writing in the 21 st Century eds

Text Journal of Writing and Writing Programs, 2019

Encounters with the historical and contemporary materiality of travel may occur objectively and/or imaginatively, as the traveller moves by air, land or water, passes streets, squares, buildings, enters rooms, museums, palaces, crosses bridges, mountains, canyons. Even other people can present as material entities, encapsulating the shock of difference, the flesh and odours of lived reality, the impossibility of possession. However prepared for a journey by reading, thinking, and research, in the end, for the writer as traveller, it is the act of travel while writing itself which becomes the heuristic enterprise, the experiment which leads to a solution, an understanding or a new question that may never be definitively solved. This discussion explores the representability of travel writing as material engagement and as a creative endeavour of scholarly inquiry. The presentation will take the form of a framed auto/narrative which follows a sequence of journeys undertaken by the author, in reverse order that speak to questions of authenticity and illusion across space and time.

The Philosophy of History and the Problem of Genre in Travel Literature

The narrator is always motivated by a genuine desire to develop and refine the random course of events that make up his experience and ascribe them a narrative quality determined by his own sense of logic. As a result, it is quite possible that the resulting text might exceed the confines of the documentary genre; the story might actually become a literary work. When deciding whether travel generates notes from the road interspersed with supplementary essays, or a series of essay-sketches in the genre of art criticism combined with elements of fiction, or a story, or even a novel, we inevitably find ourselves tangled up in a whole range of problems relating to the differences between non-fiction and literature. The difficulty of classifying literary travelogues and determining whether the text is notes from an actual trip, making it a documentary text, or an artistic construct, a literary text, is quite similar to the issues of authenticity in modern historical study. History is, by its very nature, simply the random assortment of various facts and the problem of their logical organization is an eternal and quite irresolvable puzzle for this field. The traveler relating his experiences finds himself in a similar situation, with an infinite quantity of people, events, and landscapes at his disposal, yet forced to select only a portion of them to present as a cohesive travelogue. To create an engaging read, to gain and maintain the reader’s attention, the author must create a structure for the text. Such a process entails the replacement of the truth with the literary truth, which itself is not far from inference and even verges on simple invention. In historiography, the boundaries separating these elements are extremely ill-defined. Long debate over the means of organizing historical knowledge has revealed that the narrative organization of historical knowledge has no direct correlation with its degree of allegiance to or departure from the truth. Because of the similarity of problems defining genre in both travelogue and historiography, the contemporary critical philosophy of history might provide a basis for a productive mode for analyzing the genre affiliation of travelogues.

Travelling in the traces of…: The travelogue and its pre-texts

Text: Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs, 2019

Travelling is always a travelling in traces-looking for traces of past cultures or following the traces of previous travellers. These traces can be material or textual, visual, performative or mnemonic. In some of the best of 20 th travel writing, such quests for traces do, however, take an inward and self-reflective turn in which travel writing becomes a form of self-writing and self-staging. In my essay, I will survey this development from the eighteenth century to the present, beginning with Grand Tour accounts of journeys to Italy to then focus on modernist and postmodernist travel writing. This will take us not only to Etruscan Places with DH Lawrence or Patagonia with Bruce Chatwin, to Asia Minor on Alexander's Path with Freya Stark or to the Caribbean with Amryl Johnson but back into these writer's lives, their deepest memories and desires. What should emerge in my readings is how writing the 'Other' can become a way of writing the Self.