Travel Writing in a Postcolonial World

Amine Zidouh

Travel writing has been, is, and probably will remain, demonized by postcolonial critics. This
‘genre’ has very quickly been linked to what Edward Said named Colonial Discourse, mainly for
what many believe to be an intertwined relationship with colonialism. Travel writing’s main
‘contribution’ is to have diffused sermons of difference and by difference; inferiority, which was
then used a rhetorical apology by the west to conquer and colonize. David Spurr in his book The
Rhetoric of Empire argues in the same direction. He suggests that travel writings constituted “a
source of information” to future-colonial administrators about the situations in their future
colonies; that by describing and gazing upon they already started having a sense of ownership
vis-à-vis these spaces. Douglas Ivison starts his article entitled “Travel Writing at the End of
Empire…” by arguing in the same direction, he says that “[t]he practice of travel writing, and
that of reading travel books, was inextricably intertwined with the creation and maintenance of
European imperialism. Travel and its by-product travel writing were both enabled by and
essential to, both cause and effect of, the project of imperial expansionism.” (2003: 1) It is thus
very clear that there is a definite yet very complex interconnection between imperialism and
travel writing.

In her masterpiece Colonialism/Postcolonialism Ania Loomba reminds us about one of

Foucault’s teachings, she says that “knowledge is [never] innocent but profoundly connected
with operations of power” (1998: 43). She also indicates how this Foucauldian insight is key to
Edward Said’s claim in Orientalism, which points out the magnitude to which knowledge about
“the orient” accompanied colonial expansion. Said argues that these representations of “the
orient” contributed to the creation of a dichotomy between the west; Europe and its others. A
duality that was more than indispensable to the creation of European culture as well as to provide
rhetorical apologies for European expansion. One of Said’s main objectives can be said to be that
of demonstrating how this knowledge about “the orient” in particular (and about all non-
Europeans in general) was part of a whole process of maintaining power and dominance over
them. We begin to understand the relevance of this Foucauldian lesson, knowledge is never
objective, always ideological, and its main danger lies in its illusion of total objectivity. For
Edward Said, this study of “the orient” was rather a political vision of reality whose construction
advertised the difference between the West; the familiar, and the orient; the strange. He claims
that the even more devastating effect is that of “polarization”; that is the west was becoming
even more western like and that therefore the orient was becoming even less ‘civilized’
(‘civilization’ being mainly a western product). Famous postcolonial figure Frantz Fanon writes
that in a sense it was the material wealth and free labor of the colonies that made Europe what it
has become, or in his own words that Europe was built on “the sweat of the dead bodies of
Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races”(1967: 77). That in many ways it is Europe that is
the creation of “the third world” and not the opposite. Colonial discourse then, is not just a
“fancy new word for colonialism” (2005: 50) as Loomba rightly argues, rather it indicates “new
ways of thinking in which cultural, intellectual, economic and political processes are seen to
work together in the formation, perpetuation and ultimately the dismantling of colonialism”
(2005: 54). Colonial discourse Studies therefore seek to offer in-depth analyses of colonial
epistemologies and also link them to the history of, again one of Foucault’s ‘favorite’ concepts,
colonial institutions. Travel writing therefore finds itself to be at the center of this process. They
are examples of texts that have been appropriated, but also constructed by the colonial
institutions. They are at the same time a cause and as well as an effect. Hence the interest in
studying this ‘genre’ of literature; in the Eagletonian sense of the word, that is literature as
ideology.

Travel writing as colonial discourse had/have two major impacts; first they permitted the average
western who will probably never set foot in these places to imagine not to say fantasize about a
vast Empire of which he or she was in control, by virtue of being part of the “civilized west”,
second and as Laura Stoler, among other, talks about in her book Race and the Education of
Desire how travelogues were essential in the very construction of the western identity, be it
national, ethnic or even erotic. How this genre was able to do that is via the use of a very down
to earth technique, that of: repetition. Jack Shaheen starts his book Reel Bad Arabs with an Arab
proverb: “Al tikrar biallem il hmar. By repetition even the donkey learns.” (2003: 1). Although
Shaheen was not talking about travel narratives per se, rather about another genre; the cinematic
discourse, which shares so many characteristics with travel narratives, as far as representation is
concerned. One can even see Hollywood as being today’s travel narratives. As a matter of fact
(although research need to be done before putting forward any claim) one could easily think of
movies nowadays as having much more impact that written works, just like travelogues, or plays
did once vis-à-vis other genres that were seen as not very entertaining.

A very interesting concept to investigate when talking about travel narratives as colonial
discourse is that of the traveler. Travel, Salman Rushdie argues in Imaginary Homelands, is “a
movement that originates in the rich parts of the planet and heads for the poor.” The traveler
therefore, and as James Clifford puts it in Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth
Century is “someone who has the security and privilege to move about in relatively
unconstrained ways” (1997: 34). The idea that one could understand as being central in the
construct of the traveler is the concept of access. Access to travel was not in the hands of anyone
and everyone. There was a clear cut line between who can travel and who cannot. Therefore
since most, not to say all, travelers came from a certain social class, shares certain values, this
could only have passed to their writings.

Concepts such as that of social class, economic prosperity as well as political vision become
indeed engrafted in the travelogues. When coming into confrontation with the other, the traveler
constructs his or her own self in opposition. If the ‘native’ is dirty the western is clean, if he or
she is sexually promiscuous the western is not, if he or she has slaves, slavery had to be
abolished in the west, etc.

Yet, something seems to be lacking in this image. Was the ‘orient’ that passive? Just lying there
for Europe to come and represent it; and via this representative power to construct it? What about
non-western travelogues, where there any? The whole concept of travel has been linked to the
west if not to Europe. Travel writing is seen as Clark puts it: as a “one-way traffic” (1999: 3).
What seems to be forgotten is that the world was written about and even mapped by ‘Arabs’
when Europe was in its dark ages. These very maps were later used by Europeans to ‘discover’
the distant spaces that they will come to conquer. Can we talk about Travel writings of the
margins? Can such a thing even exist? Well clearly that’s what seems to be lacking to the
picture. The importance of travelogues (in the European sense) was not so much their originality
or anything, it was rather the very ideology that was governing them, the system that made them
not only texts but powerful, dominant texts, the academic disciplines that studied them, the
whole western civilization that made them possible but also used them to serve its deepest
imperialistic interests.

Spivak also touches upon this issue in her master-work Can the Subaltern Speak? Can there be a
space for the margins to speak for themselves? I believe this to be at the center of
postcolonialism. Can we then talk of Postcolonial Travel Writings? Here the first problem that
we encounter is again one of the institutional kind. One could easily talk about postcolonialism
as having been and having become too engrafted in the Western university, raising therefore
once again the Foucauldian problem of knowledge, power and institutions. But let us not
divagate from the main interest of this paper, which is travel writing. Another reason why Travel
writing has always been seen as a European practice can be summed up in this claim by social
geographer Doreen Massey when she says that the “regulation[s] of the world into a single
trajectory, via the temporal convening of space, was, and still often is, a way of refusing to
address the essential multiplicity of the spatial” (2005: 71). Although Massey is obviously not
tackling the issue of postcolonial discourse, neither of travel writing but her argument can be
used in that regard. The Eurocentric view of any other space as being marginal finds itself to be
at the center of this thorny issue. The fact that such a thing as Postcolonial travel writing was not
spoken about before may also be understood vis-à-vis western hegemony. Or, how the subaltern
comes to being. In other words, how the colonized subject (though not all) ends up consenting to
their situation until even looking at oneself as inferior and becoming not only a subaltern but also
a fervent defender of the colonial interests. Ultimately looking at the western travel narratives as
being the norm, whereas any trial to “write back to the empire” is just mere-nonsense.