Travel Writing at the End of Empire: A Pom Named Bruce and the Mad White Giant

Abstract

THE PRACTICE OF TRAVEL WRITING, and that of reading books, was inextricably intertwined with creation and maintenance of European imperialism. Travel and its by-product writing were both enabled by and essential to, both cause and effect of, project of imperial expansionism. As Sara Mills points out in Discourses of Difference, for many recent critics (that is since appearance of Edward Said's Orientalism [1978]), writing is essentially an instrument within colonial expansion and served to reinforce colonial rule once in (2). Travel books were essential to European imperialism in that implicated their readers vicariously in imperialist project. Mary Louise Pratt's influential Imperial Eyes shows books by Europeans about non-European parts of world went (and go) about creating domestic subject of Euroimperialism; how have engaged metropolitan reading publics with (or to) expansionist enterprises whose material benefits accrued mainly to very few (4). Travel narratives, as part of what David Spurr has called the rhetoric of empire, provided imperial administrators with information about furthest reaches of (or beyond), facilitating Empire's expansion and administration, while constituting the Empire for its readers. These narratives allowed Europeans, most of whom would never set foot in places described, to imagine vast of which they were in control. As Ann Laura Stoler shows in Race and Education of Desire, imperial project was essential to constitution of identities--racial, sexual, and national. Travel, which denotes range of material, spatial that produce knowledges, stories, traditions, comportments, musics, books, diaries, and other cultural expressions (Clifford 35), repeatedly reconstituted and imperial identities through necessarily repetitive nature of its performance. Furthermore, genre of writing, particularly subgenre that we might call travel, (1) was cultural by-product of imperialism, often written by those actively involved in expansion or maintenance of (explorers, soldiers, administrators, missionaries, journalists), and dependent upon support of institutions of imperialism in order to facilitate writers' travels. Travel and writing are determined by and determine gender, racial identity, national identity, economic status and host of other interrelated markers of status and privilege. Travel is inextricably implicated in a history of European, literary, male, bourgeois, scientific, heroic, recreational meanings and practices (Clifford 33), and simultaneously invokes and disavows those connotations in producing travelling subject. Some of socio-cultural markings implied by term travel are illustrated in following passage from guide to adventure travel: Take, for example, Manhattan writer Fran Lebowitz, who defines outdoors as a place you must pass through in order to get from your apartment into taxicab. To Fran, twenty-minute walk through New Jersey suburbs would qualify as an adventurous undertaking, fraught with risk of falling branches, unforeseeable danger of Lyme disease, and unexpected excitement of an encounter with squirrel. To mountaineer Reinhold Messner, on other hand, an expedition to summit of Mount Everest, using supplemental oxygen, probably would not qualify as particularly exciting or remarkable experience, since he's already climbed Everest couple of times without oxygen, once by himself. (Noland xiii) The distinction that Noland is making between two types of travellers is clearly marked by discourses of gender, race (Jew/German), and nationality (American/Austrian), as well as others. The point is that such discourses are always embedded within notion of travel. …