Abstract
This essay examines early 20th century travel texts written by two European women: the Catalan journalist Aurora Bertrana (1899-1974) who lived in French Polynesia from 1926 until 1929, and her contemporary, the Dutch journalist Mary Pos (1904-1987), who travelled to the Dutch East Indies in the fall of 1938 and returned early in 1939. Our research is double-focused: on the one hand it examines issues of empire, colonisation, and orientalism, and on the other hand it explores issues of modernity and feminism. The travel texts under study offer personal registrations of self-fashioning strategies that both authors employ, which significantly question gender expectations regarding women’s social and sexual practices, their professional, familial and marital roles, and their opportunities for education. Presenting them as emancipated modern women, however, the accounts are also embedded in an orientalist and colonial discourse and seem to impose their own views of modernity and feminism on other women–despite ardent appeals to intercultural understanding.
Highlights
Since the 1970s there has been a proliferation of studies on women’s travel writing which have established a firm canon of works in the genre
James Duncan and Dereck Gregory explain that travel writing ‹‹raises questions about the politics of representation and spaces of transculturation, about the continuities between colonial past and supposedly post-colonial present, and about the ecological, economic and cultural implications of globalizing projects of modernity›› (Duncan and Gregory 1)
The travel texts that we analyse here are written by European women in the 1930s, a period when the topics identified by Duncan and Gregory, namely colonial projects and post-colonial struggles, intersected with discourses of modernisation, early 20th century feminism, and globalisation
Summary
Since the 1970s there has been a proliferation of studies on women’s travel writing which have established a firm canon of works in the genre. Spanish women’s accounts of travels to Morocco in the 19th and 20th centuries (such as those written by Carmen de Burgos, Rosa Regás and Aurora Bertrana) illustrate the ambivalent position of women travellers because they often wrote from the margins of Spanish society but maintained the colonialist/orientalist attitude towards «oriental» peoples (García-Ramón et al 1998; Epps 2016; Goyadol 2008; Torres-Pou 2006) Their texts were embedded within Spanish Africanism, a term used to designate the political interventionism of Spain in Morocco at the beginning of the twentieth century (Morales 1988). Babs Boter & Irene Villaescusa Illán Self-fashioning and othering: Women’s double strategies of travel writing glorietijd [«Once on Java and Sumatra»: The last travel book on our Indies in its glory time] (1948) These texts seem to confirm her straightforward claim that as a Dutch journalist and lecturer she had a moral responsibility to contribute to a better intercultural understanding between Dutch and Indonesian women. They demonstrate the extended continuum along which white European women measured and assessed the indigenous women they encountered
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