Postcolonial Travel Writing : Critical Explorations

Travel writing is an interdisciplinary genre that, in recent times, has become an important area of study. Closely linked to issues of imperialism, diaspora, multiculturalism, nationalism, identity, gender, globalization, colonialism and postcolonialism, it brings into play ideas of transculturation, the idea of the centre and the margin, border crossings, hybridity, location and displacement. Travel entails a movement away from a familiar place and location to an unfamiliar one, a new place, one that is different from one’s home. This difference may often pose threats to one’s identity as it brings into purview ideas of the self and the other. Hence travel and travel writing raise important questions. How does postcolonial travel writing represent this idea of identity, self and otherness? Can travel be a means of finding out one’s identity? The essays in Postcolonial Travel Writing provide a sharper focus on the postcolonial issues broached in two other books on the subject: Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory and Transit, edited by Steve Clark, and Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies, edited by Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose. Where Clark’s volume includes texts belonging to both the colonial and postcolonial period and uses new historicism, travel theory and postcolonialism in its analysis, and where Blunt and Rose’s examines the interface between race, gender and feminism, the volume under review concentrates on postcolonial texts. Postcolonial Travel Writing, as the editors point out, is not just about “writing back.” As the editors say in the introduction,