Travel and Text

Abstract

In the most minimalist sense, travel would translate as the movement between geographical locations and cultural experiences. But, if we went beyond by looking at how this movement operates psychicaEy, metaphorically and politically, we would notice that in narratives of displacement the relation ship between self, home, nation, travel and encounter is both varied and complicated. For centuries, renowned travellers like Herodotus, Marco Polo, Chris topher Columbus, Richard Burton and others have inspired awe and ad miration in their readers with their authentic reports on peoples and cultures. Narratives of travel and exploration are, more often than not, concerned with the construction of an Other. The traveller in the position of heightened authority of ethnographer/consumer finds himself inevitably engaged in a process of judgment and comparison. Raising questions of agency and legitimacy has been one of the major concerns of academics in current debates on travel writings. Recent discussions centred on the literature of exploration, narratives of discovery and colonial ethnography have questioned the objectivity of representations and have focused on the imperialist traveller's authority and power to totalize and appropriate. In his seminal work on European writings about the Other, Edward Said (1978) shows how discourses of Orientalism have dominated works that write on a different country or evoke different cultures, and have made us aware of the ideological features of the writing process. Several other postcolonial scholars have shown how relations of power present in the literature of travel have facilitated and justified conquest, religious conversion, imperialism and exploitation. Arguably, travel has been predominantly western domi nated, strongly male and upper middle class (Clifford, 1997:64), but recent scholarship exploring the relation between gender and textual ideologies fo cuses on travel accounts by women through the ages. Studies undertaken by Kaplan (1996), Pratt (1992) and Mills (1991) have opened up a large com parative topic that looks into how women travelled, wrote and perceived other cultures. Mills (1991) notes that while some of these accounts provide a distinct feminist perspective, in some other cases such literary excursions by women prove to be effective power trips implicitly communicating feel ings of racial superiority and imposing blanket labels on representations. These theoretical models provide fairly satisfying frames to study Orientalist texts of travellers, but travel can also be conceptualized as