Travelogues of Difference

Abstract

Influenced especially by Tzvetan Todorov’s analysis of early modern European travelogues, travel literature has provided a strong heuristic for comprehending the development of modern and contemporary expressions of the international. This heuristic tends to emphasize the overpowering frameworks of the figure of inversion and the mechanism of othering to make sense of the relation between identity and alterity. This article retains the intuition that travel literature can provide for an heuristic of this relation while exploring an alternative way to decenter the European centeredness and modernist core of contemporary theories of international relations (IR) and calling on a non-European and non-modern travelogue to provide for such heuristic. Specifically, it explores some aspects of classical Greece as offering both a similar and a dissimilar experience to alterity by analyzing Herodotus' travel literature and the ways by which he translates difference into the realm of sameness. Calling upon Herodotus' writing shows that narration of difference does not necessarily imply othering and thus opens up new ways to conceptualize identity and alterity.