Mapping the World Differently E-Book

Maria Christina Ramos

• Herausgeber: Publicacions de la Universitat de València
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Biblioteca Javier Coy d'Estudis Nord-Americans
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 270

Beschreibung

This book examines the rich collection of travel writing about Spain by twentieth-century African American writers as Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Frank Verby, surveying the ways in which such authors perceive Spain's place in the world. From the vantage point of Spain, these African American writers create transformative literary maps of the world that invite readers to reconsider their relations to others.

Leseprobe

MAPPING THE WORLD DIFFERENTLY

AFRICAN AMERICANTRAVEL WRITING ABOUT SPAIN

Biblioteca Javier Coy d’estudis nord-americans http://www.uv.es/bibjcoy

DirectoraCarme Manuel

MAPPING THE WORLD DIFFERENTLY

AFRICAN AMERICANTRAVEL WRITING ABOUT SPAIN

Maria Christina Ramos

Biblioteca Javier Coy d’estudis nord-americansUniversitat de València

Mapping the World Differently: African American Travel Writing about Spain

© Maria Christina Ramos

1ª edición de 2015

Reservados todos los derechos

Prohibida su reproducción total o parcial

ISBN: 978-84-9134-164-2

Imagen de la cubierta: Portulano encargado por Carlos V

Diseño de la cubierta: Celso Hernández de la Figuera

Publicacions de la Universitat de València

http://puv.uv.es

[email protected]

For my mother, who taught me the importance of feeling rooted, and for my father, who showed me the joy of wandering

Acknowledgments

It is my pleasure to thank some of those who made this book possible. First, I would like to thank Carme Manuel, general editor of the Biblioteca Javier Coy d’estudis nord-americans at the Universitat de València, for expressing interest in this manuscript and for generously providing me the opportunity to share this study of fascinating travel writing about Spain with readers. I would also like to acknowledge those who supported me through writing the dissertation from which this book evolved, including my director, Zita Nunes, and committee members for their engagement with this work. In addition, I am grateful to Smith College for the time and space for writing provided me through the Mendenhall Fellowship and to Daphne Lamothe in particular for generously reading some of the earliest chapter drafts. And I thank J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College, as well, for its support of my research.

I am particularly indebted to my friends who have urged me on along the way in the development of this project. Colleagues Ghazala Hashmi, Jane Rosecrans, Ashley Bourne-Richardson, and Bitsy Gilfoyle especially have provided a vibrant intellectual community that continues to sustain me amidst the inevitably heavy demands of the job. I also benefitted enormously from the good humor and camaraderie of fellow writers Michelle Brown and Jeannette Marianne Lee. And without the constant encouragement of dear friend and scholar Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich this project would never have been completed.

And finally, this book was made possible by the love and support of my extraordinary family. Many thanks to my parents, Oscar and Luisa Ramos, for, among other things, their unshakable confidence in me, and to my brothers Joe and Ozzie for gently pushing me to the finish line. Thanks to the beautiful Oscar James Carroll for his tremendous energy and inspiration. And, of course, my deepest gratitude and love go to my husband, John Timothy Carroll, for his patience, intellectual companionship, and loving partnership, all of which enrich my life immeasurably.

Portions of Chapter 2 were previously published in Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies (2011) and have been reproduced with permission from Palgrave McMillan.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION“A hunger to understand”

CHAPTER 1Approaching African American Travel Writing about Spain

CHAPTER 2“Moors as dark as me”: Mapping Spain in the Early Twentieth Century

CHAPTER 3Frank Yerby’s Novel of Moorish Spain and the Trans-Mediterranean

CHAPTER 4“Spain was baffling”: Locating the West in Richard Wright’s Pagan Spain

CHAPTER 5A Stranger in Spain?: Lori Tharps’s Kinky Gazpacho

CONCLUSION

WORKS CITED

Portolan Chart of the Mediterranean World Mateo Prunes, 1559

Introduction

“A hunger to understand”

Richard Wright begins Pagan Spain (1957) with a portrait of himself in a car, staring at the Pyrenees ahead and trying to convince himself to cross the border from southern France into Spain. He explains that over the years numerous friends, not least among them, Gertrude Stein, had recommended he visit the country. Yet years later, when he finally travels to the border, he still hesitates to cross. Sitting in the car, steering wheel in hand, there is no physical or legal barrier preventing him from his journey—only a “state of mind” (3). The travelogue of Wright’s time in Spain in 1954 and 1955 opens not with a picture of physical movement, as one might expect, but with a compelling moment of contemplation. What is keeping him from entering “a Spain that beckoned as much as it repelled” (3)? Wright focuses our attention on the intellectual and emotional work his journey demands rather than the physical movement it requires. In this moment he is forced to consider what the idea of Spain means to him, what it will mean for him to travel its landscape and interact with its people.

Wright explains that his hesitation does not stem from fear of Spain’s totalitarian regime headed by General Francisco Franco. After all, he tells us, he had already experienced totalitarianism in the “absolutistic racist regime in Mississippi” and during his year in Perón’s Argentina (3). Indeed, one might even imagine that his travel in Spain would be freer than the experience of traveling as an African American in the U.S. at that time, particularly in the South. Wright points, instead, to another reason for why Spain is the “one country of the Western world” about which he wished not to “exercise [his] mind”:

The fate of Spain had hurt me, had haunted me; I had never been able to stifle a hunger to understand what had happened there and why. Yet I had no wish to resuscitate mocking recollections while roaming a land whose free men had been shut in concentration camps, or exiled, or slain. An uneasy question kept floating in my mind: How did one live after the death of the hope for freedom? (4)

Despite his hesitations, Wright reconciles himself to his journey and turns the car towards “the Pyrenees which, some authorities claim, mark the termination of Europe and the beginning of Africa” (4). So begins his travelogue of Spain. Wright’s account is more than a simple record of sites visited or a description of the customs and manners of a foreign culture. Rather, the introduction to his travel narrative suggests important personal and political consequences of travel, as well as a range of uses of the travel narrative; his difficulty with simply the prospect of travel in this passage suggests that there is more at stake in travel than we might at first assume.

Wright’s reluctance to cross the border into Spain seems to arise from the series of difficult issues he expects to explore through his travel. His desire to understand the “fate of Spain,” that is, its fall from a republic into a dictatorship at the end of the Spanish Civil War, is a quest to understand the failure of social democracy to prevail over oppression worldwide.1 This failure, among others, defies Wright’s faith in humanism. His attention to the question of how people can “live after the death of the hope for freedom” reflects his increasingly pessimistic attitude regarding his ability to find a place in which to live and write freely himself.2 And his investigation of both of these issues through Spain illustrates his belief that local phenomena can be used to represent larger global phenomena.3 Wright’s journey into Spain, then, becomes a journey for understanding—understanding a personal issue (why thinking of Spain “hurt” and “haunted” him so), understanding a local issue (what accounted for “the fate of Spain” itself), and understanding a global issue (how did people live “after the death of the hope for freedom”). For Wright, travel could be a powerful enterprise, the effects of which had personal, local, and global implications.

But why was Spain the place Wright used to explore his larger questions about the human response to political oppression when it is clear in his introduction that he had experienced oppression in other places? And why did his journey into Spain precipitate the striking image of a journey into Africa at the end of his introduction? We can begin to see answers to these questions in a letter from Wright to his agent, Paul Reynolds, in which he proposes that his book about Spain would show “how a non-western people living in Europe work out their life problems” (qtd. in Fabre 411). His proposal reveals assumptions about the Spanish people’s relation to the rest of Europe. Spain, for Wright, provides an example of otherness located within the West. Though ostensibly part of Europe, Spain’s proximity to Africa and its longstanding association with cultural otherness make it an intriguing location for study. Spain is mapped by Wright as a liminal space, a contact zone through which one can study complex issues concerning the relationship of the West to the rest of the world without leaving Europe itself. The Spanish people and culture would provide insight into the various national, cultural, and racial identities that have traditionally been used to create the idea of a “West” that is distinct from other locations around the globe.

Wright’s book is not the only travel writing that uses Spain to investigate these issues; indeed, Wright is not the only well-known African American writer to produce an extensive piece of travel writing about Spain. Claude McKay and Langston Hughes both recount their travels in Spain during the 1930s in travel memoirs and poetry. McKay narrates his initial trips through Spain at the start of that decade in his memoir A Long Way from Home (1937) and develops Spanish themes in several poems from his “Cities” cycle (c. 1934), some of which are included in the memoir. Langston Hughes describes his experiences in Spain in 1937 in a series of articles reporting on the Spanish Civil War for the Baltimore Afro-American, articles that he later integrated into his travel memoir I Wonder as I Wander (1956). Moreover, Spain’s Civil War becomes the subject of some of Hughes’s most provocative poetry of the 1930s. In addition to these non-fiction examples of African American travel writing about Spain, Frank Yerby made Spain and Spanish figures the subject of his popular fiction, which he referred to as “costume novels.” In particular, his 1965 novel An Odor of Sanctity, subtitled A Novel of Medieval Moorish Spain, is centered on the epic journey of its hero, a Christian Goth named Alaric, through the Iberian peninsula during the tumultuous years of Arab-Berber dominance in the South. The novel highlights the political and social exchange of the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish cultures present during the medieval period in the Iberian peninsula. These authors are joined by figures such as Arthur Schomburg, Nella Larsen, Chester Himes, and Dorothy Peterson, who left documents of their travel and—in the case of Himes, Peterson, and Yerby—their expatriation to Spain. The existence of this archive of texts prompts the question that sparked this book: What made Spain a compelling site for exploration by a number of prominent African American figures during the twentieth century?

Mapping the World Differently provides a close reading of the representations of Spain in twentieth-century African American travel writing. In particular, it investigates a series of questions about what can be observed in these representations.

First, as travel writing, these texts record the authors’ lived experiences traveling in Spain, experiences that are very much shaped by their perceptions of themselves as black writers traveling outside of the U.S. How, then, is an African American identity explored and developed in relation to Spain in this travel writing?

Second, as texts about place, these works are not simple transcriptions of the writers’ interactions with a stable, clearly understood location. While they describe interactions in particular moments with the physical and social reality of a place called Spain, they also reflect the writers’ interactions with a host of previous representations of Spain, stories existing about the place that are evoked by the presence of the landscape and people themselves. In this way, these texts describe interactions with discursive constructions of Spain as much as any interactions with a “real” place.4 What is the Spain that they these writers perceive and represent?

And third, as literary texts these works do not simply mimic reality; rather, they create a reality imagined by the writers. If we read these texts as productions that map out a perspective of and through Spain, what is the landscape that they present? How do they map Spain’s place in the world even as they map out these writers’ positions in relation to the worlds around them?

Resulting from an examination of these questions, this study argues that twentieth-century African American travel writing about Spain is concerned with the power of geographic imagination in shaping our relationships to others around the globe. Revising accepted imaginative geographies5 rooted in early modern European colonial conceptions of the world, these travel narratives use the vantage point of Spain in an effort to create new maps of the globe, opening up possibilities for reconceiving transnational black identities. Central to this project are the transformative literary maps of Spain narrated within these works. Spain is mapped as one site within a network of interconnected sites, pulsating with the ebb and flow of exchange across space and time. The perceived liminal position of Spain—geographically (between Europe and Africa), historically and culturally (between West and East), and politically (between liberal secularism and religious totalitarianism)—enables challenges to the static traditional European divisions of global space. Similarly, individual identities are mapped like networked spaces, as relational and always in flux, as seen in the recurring use of one of the most common figures of representation in these works, the “Moor,” whose ethnic, racial, religious, and status identities are constantly shifting. The indeterminate nature of the Moor’s identity, both as a marker of difference and as an image allowing a variety of affinities and alliances, provides these African American writers with a figure through which to reconsider the value of transnational back identities. These works, therefore, not only create specific visions of Spain but also use Spain as a lens through which to reconstruct global spaces with the goal of shaping the global relations that are constructed by and within these spaces.

In Chapter 1, I will provide a context for this book, noting the key threads of scholarship and concepts that have shaped my approach to analyzing African American travel writing about Spain. It begins with a rationale for studying this particular archive of travel writing and includes a brief survey of the Anglo and Anglo-American representations of Spain that the African American travel literature in this study is revising. It also provides background for my specific geographic approach to these narratives, including a discussion of literary cartography and an introduction to contemporary counter-cartographic methods that can be applied in African diasporic studies.

Chapter 2 examines the travel writing about Spain by two key figures associated with the Harlem Renaissance, Claude McKay and Langston Hughes, whose experiences with Spain occurred during the 1930s. In memoirs and poetry, McKay and Hughes represent Spain as a location from which larger global issues of their time can be framed and understood. In particular, the work of these writers combines reflections on the Spanish situation in the turbulent 1930s and reflections on U.S. race politics, creating a commentary on black identity, nationalism, and cosmopolitan/transnational politics. To do this work, they invoke the medieval Islamic empire in Spain and employ the figure of the Moor as a central metaphor for understanding and representing various forms of national and racial identity. In the process of creating these narratives, we can also see these writers recovering a tradition of travel for developing political theory. In particular, McKay and Hughes focus on travel and the resulting engagement with the other—whether imagined in the past or present—as a path to engaged reflection on self and home.

Chapter 3 focuses on the travels of the main character in Frank Yerby’s 1965 novel An Odor of Sanctity: A Novel of Medieval Moorish Spain. Read through the lens of travel writing, this novel exposes the ways in which the experience of travel and cultural exchange can unsettle one’s sense of home and self. The novel, set against the backdrop of medieval Iberia, blurs the boundaries between Europe, Africa, and the Middle East as it maps a trans-Mediterranean geography and culture in which a network of sites of cultural and material exchange tie disparate groups together in an intimate narrative over an expanse of time. The novel critiques nationalism, among other essentialist identities, as the protagonist restlessly roams this territory in search of the component ingredients through which to craft and express a sense of an authentic self, futilely attempting to stabilize boundaries and categories that stubbornly refuse to remain static. Even the form of Yerby’s novel resists clear categorization by genre, developing and abandoning the conventions of a number of possible genres—the popular romance, the actionadventure tale, historical fiction—leaving the hybrid format of the travel narrative as a useful way to conceive of the plot.

Chapter 4 explores the self-conscious use of the travel narrative as a tool for developing political wisdom in Richard Wright’s Pagan Spain (1957), his book-length travelogue of his trips to Spain. When read through the lens of his other travel narratives of the 1950s, particularly his 1956 The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference, Pagan Spain is revealed as a complex investigation of the modern heritage of religious, racial, and national identities as they were manifesting themselves during the height of the Cold War. Wright uses his travel narrative of Spain, a Western European nation, to challenge the three-world concept of the map that was then dominating Cold War politics (and continues to haunt conceptions of the globe) in the hopes of envisioning a new system of global relations that could escape the Cold War’s binaries and limited political options. He uses his rendering of the Spanish nation as a meditation on Western identity, ultimately mapping Spain at the heart of the modern European colonial identity and presenting its fate under Franco as a cautionary tale for Cold War powers. Wright further argues for the need to understand our methods of relating to others as central to any construction of identity that is meaningful.

Finally, Chapter 5 turns to a contemporary African American travel narrative about Spain. It compares Lori Tharps’s Kinky Gazpacho (2008) to earlier travel writing discussed in this study to help shed light on the way changing relationships to nation and race in the U.S. have affected representations of Spain and the imaginative geography in which it is envisioned. Tharps’s narrative begins with different assumptions about the intersection of race and nation that affect her relation to and representation of Spain. The effects of travel, however, are such that towards the end of her book, reflection on these categories begins to lead her into territory similar to that developed by the authors discussed in the previous chapters.

These chapters build on one another to show various relationships with Spain as a space that demands new ways of understanding individual identity in relation to a global imaginary that is meaningful in the present.

_________________________

1 At the 1937 Second American Writer’s Congress in New York, Wright made his pro-Loyalist position clear. In addition, he published a series of articles for the Daily Worker about the Spanish Civil War and contributed a letter to the 1938 volume Writers Taking Sides: Letters about the War in Spain from 419 American Authors.

2 Fabre notes Wright’s increasing dissatisfaction with even the freedom of life in exile (Unfinished 383).

3 In an interview given three years later, Wright explains that, in the U.S., black writers are encouraged to write about “universal” topics, minimizing their experience as black Americans. Wright counters that the “ghetto” experience itself is universal (Hakutani 122). In Pagan Spain, Wright refers to oppressed groups within Spain, including Protestants, Jews, and women, as “white Negroes,” revealing his use of the category of “Negro” as an experience of the oppression rather than a racial designation.

4 This study will not examine the historical accuracy of the representations of Spain in this travel writing; that is, it will not attempt to judge the veracity of these representations of Spain as “objective” accounts of the places and history represented (though this could be an interesting project, yielding interesting results regarding problems of translation as there are many problematic renderings of Spanish culture throughout).

5 Here I am drawing from Edward Said’s notion of imaginative geography as the process through which cultural meanings and values are assigned to particular material spaces and the ways in which these meanings reflect the relations between the creators of such spaces and their subjects (54-5).

Chapter 1

Approaching African American Travel Writing about Spain

Because maps are social, concerning people in groups, some cultural realities of civilizations need cartographic assistance to make them visible.

Vincent Virga, Cartographia

The past few decades have seen an intensification of interest in African American travel writing, as demonstrated by the publication of two anthologies of African American travel writing in the late twentieth century: Alasdair Pettinger’s Always Elsewhere: Travels of the Black Atlantic (1998) and Farah J. Griffin and Cheryl Fish’s A Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African-American Travel Writing (1998). These collections, and much of the scholarly discussion surrounding African American travel writing, challenge tendencies to see travel writing as the provenance of Europeans and Anglo-Americans, and they foreground connections between mobility and subjectivity that surface in African American travel narratives. Yet they also largely reflect the typical scholarly focus on particular sites of travel frequented by African American intellectuals over the last two centuries, including locations in Western Africa, Latin America, France, and the Soviet Union.1 By focusing on Spain as a subject of African American travel writing, however, Mapping the World Differently broadens the discussion of African American travel to include a location that inspired a significant body of travel writing by major African American writers but that has also often been ignored.

Spain might, at first, seem an unlikely location to be the subject of so many major African American writers. During much of the twentieth century, Spain did not have a reputation as a bastion of liberal democracy as did France. Just the opposite: Spain was under authoritarian Francoist rule after is civil war. Nor was it a location with a recognized significant African diasporic population, as the Caribbean is. Yet Spain still attracted enough twentieth-century African American intellectuals to its shores to create a compelling archive of work about it. This study provides close readings of the patterns of representation that exist within major contributions to this body of works to illuminate what Spain, as a place and concept, offered African American writers in the first half of the twentieth century and what their representations of Spain offer in return.

Through an exploration of these representations, this study builds upon scholarship in three main areas: travel writing, transnational African American studies, and literary geocriticism.2 By analyzing what can be called the “literary maps” created in African American travel writing about Spain, I argue that these authors demonstrate how mapping can be practiced in ways that unsettle the attempts of established power to freeze spaces and people into objects easily represented in maps that serve its agenda. By drawing attention to the nature of maps as always incomplete and raising questions about the nature of boundaries, the writers considered in this study show how the practice of mapping can enable the multiple perspectives essential to producing new visions of territory. This work, then, follows the so-called “spatial turn” in literary criticism, recounted and developed by scholars like Edward Soja and Bertrand Westphal. It draws attention to the importance of what Edward Said called “imaginative geographies” in the cultural construction of others in our world. And it develops from ongoing conversations about the role of geographic imagination in understanding how we orient ourselves in the world and engage others around us.

While recognizing the past few decades’ scholarship critiquing the role of travel writing and mapping in the service of empire, I hope to explore the enabling and constructive uses of mapmaking that can be facilitated by travel and revealed in travel writing. This study, then, continues work already begun in transnational African American studies by scholars such as Paul Gilroy, charting the ways in which twentieth-century African American writers use globally positioned black diasporic identities to challenge socially-spatially constructed identities and reconfigure global relations. I argue that as the writers considered in this study reconfigure spatial arrangements they encourage visions of global black identities—identities in motion and unbounded from traditional constructions—that can forge new forms of relations and alliances with others.

The rest of this chapter discusses the key questions and areas of scholarship that this study engages and lays out my approach for examining the travel writing that is the focus of this study.

TRAVEL AND TRAVEL WRITING: FROM ORIENTALISM TOTHEORIA

Given the calls over the past few decades for the worlding of American Studies, i.e., placing American Studies in global or transnational perspectives, a resurgence of scholarly interest in travel and travel writing is not surprising. As Claire Fox suggests when addressing hemispheric frames for American literary history, “Travel writing is perhaps the mediative genre par excellence” for thinking about transnational frameworks for American Studies because it so clearly focuses on cultural exchanges that bring “the nation in tension with categories of analysis that transcend national boundaries [such as] networks of race, ethnicity, religion, and class” (Fox 639, 642). Yet when one considers travel as a category of investigation (and, of course, the travel writing associated with it), several key issues continue to surface in the scholarship. How is travel to be defined? What is the role of travel in the formation of individual and cultural identity? And what is the relationship of the knowledge produced in documents of travel to established power structures?

Given the variety of types of mobility and migrations experienced by people, it is important to consider how broadly to define the concept of travel. As James Clifford has pointed out, the term travel “goes a certain distance and falls apart into nonequivalents, overlapping experiences marked by different translation terms: ‘diaspora,’ ‘borderland,’ ‘immigration,’ ‘migrancy,’ ‘tourism,’ ‘pilgrimage,’ ‘exile’”(Routes 11). Moreover, as those within diasporic studies would remind us, not all travel is voluntary. To separate travel from the material pressures that lead to many forms of exile and migration, the term travel is often understood to involve a measure of freedom and privilege on the part of the traveler,3 even if the subject position of the traveler might affect the traveler’s experience, whether because of race, gender, or class. For my purposes, I am borrowing Helen Gilbert and Anna Johnston’s definition of travel as “a broadly defined practice featuring human movement through culturally conceived space, normally undertaken with at least some expectation of an eventual return to the place of origin” (5). This definition allows for a variety of motivations for movement as well as distance traveled. In this case, I am looking at writers who have a certain freedom traveling in Spain that they often did not have within their own home countries because of racial discrimination.

And with travel comes travel writing; the two have a long historical connection. “The traveler’s tale is as old as fiction itself,” Hulme and Youngs remind us (2). Just as travel might refer to many different forms of experiences, travel writing can be a label used for many kinds of texts. Studies of travel writing cover texts ranging from the documents that chronicle colonial explorations of the Americas to traditional travelogues, to memoirs that include significant accounts of travel. The variety of kinds of documents included in studies of travel writing demonstrates the difficulty of pinning down specific conventions of a genre called “travel writing.”

In thinking about travel writing as a collection of texts, I am maintaining the distinction Jan Borm makes between the specific genre of the travelogue and the texts that might be called travel writing more generally. In “Defining Travel: On the Travel Book, Travel Writing, and Terminology,” Borm argues against defining travel writing as a specific genre itself, i.e., limiting it to the traditional travelogue, contending instead that the label travel writing could refer to any of a variety of types of fictional or non-fictional literary productions that “deal predominantly with the theme of travel” (18). The predominance of the theme of travel becomes the unifying element of the works; travel writing becomes a topos through which some literature can be comprehended and analyzed. The traditional first-person, supposedly non-fictional account of travel, then, becomes just one genre of writing that can be placed within the larger category of travel writing (Borm 19). Travel writing defined in this way includes works associated with various literary genres as long as travel is a significant component of the work and a mechanism through and about which ideas are conveyed. Having adopted this definition, I am able to include in this study a novel by Frank Yerby in which the main character’s travels comprise the plot as well as a few of the city poems by Claude McKay in which the movement between cities is highlighted. I analyze these alongside the more traditional travelogues of Richard Wright, travel memoir of Langston Hughes, and travel essays by Arthur Schomburg.

Whether in the form of the romanticized heroic journey, a nostalgic search for a homeland, or documentary journal entries, a compelling theme of most travel writing is the transformative effect of travel on the traveler.4 Travel is central to the human experience, to beliefs about home and community. It offers an opportunity to examine the ways in which we construct physical territories as well as boundaries of social identity. The experience of travel, therefore, can be a powerful one. Trinh T. Minh-ha suggests that each journey on which one embarks involves “a re-siting of boundaries,” not just in a physical sense but also in the sense of individual and cultural identity (9). “The dialogic nature of identity formation,” explains Jane Conroy, is a reason for “the destabilizing effect of travel,” an effect that can be both frightening and enticing (xvi). The traveler embarks on a journey and discovers not only the “other” but also the self as defined through the other, as the traveler becomes aware of being not only a spectator but also the object being viewed by the culture visited. “Indeed, one does not become a ‘stranger’ until one is viewed by someone else . . . for both visitor and the visited view each other and contribute to the construction of new identities” (Roberson xviii). Travel, therefore, can prove to be a “profoundly unsettling” yet enlightening experience, “a process whereby the self loses its fixed boundaries—a disturbing yet potentially empowering practice of difference” (Trinh 23). This process makes travel writing fruitful for investigating the effects of travel at both an individual and a socio-political level.

Despite the potentially transformative effect of travel, however, much of the scholarship on travel writing has focused on exposing the connections between the knowledge produced in travel writing and the buttressing of dominant power structures, reflecting the influence of theorists such as Michel Foucault. Notable here is the importance of the groundbreaking work of Edward Said in Orientalism (1978) and the subsequent nuancing of his ideas in work such as Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes (1992). In these works and in the scholarship that has followed, travel writing is associated with European colonial expansion and has been examined for the rhetorical moves that support imperialist goals.5 These studies demonstrate how travel accounts, maps, and other information based on first-person eyewitness often became a “semi-official business in which the beginnings of imperial histories were constructed” (Hulme and Young 3). They show how travel writers construct “other” places, people, and cultures in terms that attempt to appear neutral or scientifically objective while maintaining the traveler’s cultural beliefs about his or her own culture’s superiority. What becomes important here is not what the traveler learns from travel, but the way the traveler uses accounts of travel to reinforce existing systems of domination. Even when such scholarship is nuanced, for example as in Pratt’s discussion of the concept of transculturation, the traveler’s own values and beliefs about superiority are reaffirmed even as other locations and cultures are being incorporated into a new world view. Even analyses of contemporary travel literature, as in Debbie Lisle’s The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing (2006), are concerned with how current, more culturally sensitive and politically aware representations continue to reproduce these structures in new forms.