Unravelling the politics of travelogues and Postcolonial Theory

 Author: Hajra Anwar. 

Travelogues or travel writing seemingly is the documentation of travels, however, there is also a political side to these travel writings, comprising of ideological undertones perpetuating certain dominant discourses. In this essay, the emphasis shall be on the politics of travelogues while focusing on the colonial heritage that has been perpetuated with the help of travel writings. According to some postcolonial critics, travel writing is a genre that can never free itself from perpetuating political ideologies while reinforcing those dominant discourses where cultures are stereotyped. Since the politics of travel writing is prevalent even after colonization has somehow subsided, these travelogues will always remain a neo-colonial mode that creates a dominant idea of civilization, that further reinforces a privileged position by classifying, evaluating and passing judgements on other parts of the world. While discussing the politics of travelogues the essay will primarily focus on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness taken as a travelogue, while equal emphasis shall be on Edward Said’s work Orientalism. Said’s work is an important scholarly work for it has been a pioneer study of contemporary criticism which took travel writing as a major part of its corpus, offering a particular insight into the operation of the colonial discourse. The essay thus explores relationships of culture and power found in the settings, encounters and representation of travel texts.  

The recent travel studies have been addressing the ideological dimensions and the rhetorical purposes served by the travelogues. Susan Bassnett in her book Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction discusses the political tendency of travel writers to depict the culture of the ‘Other’ in a hostile and condescending manner where the Other is stereotyped as inferior in order to exert the Western supremacy. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness although a fictional account yet completely manifests the concept of politics of travel writing. Conrad’s narrator Marlow while entering Africa gives a description of a place that sounds desolate and devoid of any life, ‘Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances (Conrad, 4). Here there is a description of a place which shows no sign of any life, devoid of any such thing which might suggest otherwise. It is important to note that in the story, Marlow goes to Africa as in the service of a Belgian company, whereas a journey was also made by Conrad in 1890 to the Congo which hence substantiate the argument that his work is not merely a work of fiction, rather it is grounded in an ideological discourse that it is perpetuating under concealment. The expeditions taken both in the fictional work and in real were taken to fulfill mission for the companies which were established in these colonies by the colonizers, i.e. the British.

As discussed above, Conrad’s work is primarily an effort to validate the European expansion in the African region so they can administer the colonies through imperialism. According to Douglas Ivison, ‘the genre of travel writing […] was the cultural by-product of imperialism, often written by those actively involved in the expansion or maintenance of empire (explorers, soldiers, administrators, missionaries, journalists) and dependent upon the support of the institutions of imperialism in order to facilitate the writers’ travels’ (2003). In the novel, Conrad attributes beastlike qualities to the African people, ‘deathlike indifference of unhappy savages […] one of these creatures rose to his hands and knees, (20)’ hence a painstakingly well documented effort on the author’s part to present an African civilization which comprises of barbarians with animalistic qualities who need to civilized hence the colonial mission.

 Edward Said’s book Orientalism has played an important role in identifying the role of travelogues as it conforms to the prejudices while it perpetuates the dominant discourses, hence Said’s work linked travel writing to colonial projects. Said drawing on Michael Foucault, theorized orientalism as a complex ideological discourse, which he defines as a Western style for dominating, restricting and having authority over the Orient.  The European travel narratives thus included seemingly objective accounts of places and people which constituted the ‘Other’, aiming to create distinctions which supported the imperialist expansion as evident in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In his scholarly work Said thus detected that many of these representations of the ‘Orient’, regardless of whether they occurred in art and fiction or in ostensibly factual, objective genres such as travel writing and ethnography, essentially comprised of these similar stereotypes and unquestioned assumptions.

Said’s idea is further strengthened by Mary Louise Pratt in her book Imperial Eyes that the travel writing by the European writers is in fact a contact between these writers and the outside world that not only represents the projection of colonial identity projected on the rest of the world but it also shows that how European identity is manifested from outside in. This is what primarily Said’s Orientalism emphasizes that the West needs to present the non-western as inferior in order to reinforce itself as superior. Conrad needed to represent the Africans as savage, in order to validate their superiority hence the consequent need to monitor and civilize the colonies.

According to Said’s concept, this barbarity of new exotic cultures becomes crucial to the European sense of self as civilized, the irrationality of the Other thus constituting the European rationality where everything starts functioning in binaries. These repeated motifs, Said suggested, were not necessarily an accurate description of the objective reality of the so-called ‘imaginative geographies’ that operate not only in the individual traveler’s mind, but also in his or her culture more generally as we saw in Conrad’s case. Hence travelogues often illuminate the mental maps that individuals and cultures have of the world and its inhabitants (especially those which it deems inferior) and the larger matrix of prejudices, fantasies and assumptions that they presume while defining the Other.

  These Colonial travelogues, in other words are not only tales about other cultures rather discourse narratives that help Europe manufacture a sense of self. Marry Pratt calls this process ‘transculturation’, where there is a reciprocal but unequal exchange between Europe and its colonies. Keeping in mind the subtle ways in which politics of travelogues work, there is the need to identify alternative representations of travel in order to challenge Eurocentric understandings of the genre, particularly the postcolonial travel texts which could resist the European production of knowledge by articulating experiences and ontologies that are often removed from discourses which perpetuate dominant ideologies. 

Work Cited:

Bassnett, Susan. Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction. UK, Blackwell, 1993.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Pakistan, Readings, 2012.

Ivison, Douglas. Travel Writing at the End of Empire: A Pom Named Bruce and the Mad White Giant. 2003.

Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes. London, Routledge, 2008.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. UK, Penguin Group, 2003.