Abstract
One of crucial issues which Western travel writers in their journeys to the Orient specifically in the height of colonialism in the nineteenth has addressed is Oriental women. Entrapped and conditioned by their cultural baggage and operating on the basis of Orientalist discourse, they have mostly presented a reductive image of their Oriental female travelees as exotic, seductive, sensual, secluded, and suppressed, in lieu of entering into a cultural dialogue and painting their picture sympathetically and respectfully. To convey their lasciviousness, they have expatiated on Oriental harems and to display their oppression foregrounded their veil and ill-treatment by their allegedly insensitive and callus menfolks. In the same period in the context of the Great Game the politically oriented Western travel writers in particular the British ones set out on a voyage to Central Asia where they encountered ethnic Turkmen. Besides gathering intelligence, the travel writers devoted considerable pages to their Turkmen female travelees as well. But their images in these travel books have not been subject to rigorous scholarly scrutiny. In this regard, the current articles in two sections seeks to redress this neglect by shedding light on how these travel writers portrayed their Turkmen female travelees in seemingly unorientalist fashion in the first part and how explicitly in Orientalist tradition in the second part.
Highlights
1.1 Brief History of Travel writingBy definition, travel writing refers to a non-fictional, first person narrative in prose which relates what happens for the narrator/travel writer in the course of his travel (Youngs, 2013)
Behdad (1994) strongly argues that this type of favorable comments do not destabilizes it; instead it demonstrates how strong, heterogeneous and resilient this discourse is. This type of positive comments for Behdad’s perspective functions as safety valve and enable the discourse of Orientalism to maintain its power and status because he holds that Orientalist is based on discontinuity, What allows the colonial power to sustain its dominant status is its political resilience... [And its] capacity to utilize effectively its voices of dissent [that is voices which deviate from its norms] ...it is precisely in the account of these discontinuous practices one can account for the shift [or flexible]...nature of Orientalist discourse that ensures its cultural hegemony (p.17)
The majority of Western travel writers have fashioned the image of Oriental female travelees the Muslim women in disapproving light as lascivious, oppressed, sealed, secluded and exotic
Summary
Travel writing refers to a non-fictional, first person narrative in prose which relates what happens for the narrator/travel writer in the course of his travel (Youngs, 2013). Western travel writers especially British travel writers used it as a vehicle to fortify their superiority, fashion their selves (Moran, 2006) This explains why the alter-space like the East was fabricated as “unrestrained, sensual, infantile, and barbaric” (p.110). IJALEL 6(3):43-57, 2017 generic borders (Farley, 2016) Another important development in travel writing is the emergence of postcolonial travel writing. Besides nature writing, ‘footsteps’ genre, another offshoot of travel writing in which a travel writer records and “retraces the journeys of earlier travel writers” (Keirstead, 2013, p.285) is trendy; it is characterized by “deep immersion in the discursive and personal space of the subjects...and holds unique capacity to undermine the still-powerful cultural myth of the self-sustaining, solitary traveler” (ibid.)
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