Mary Louise Pratt

First published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Travel Writing and Transculturation

Imperial Eyes

Laurence Favre

In the last decades of the twentieth century, processes of decolonization opened the meaning-making powers of empire to scrutiny, as part of a large- scale effort to decolonize knowledge, history, and human relations. This book is part of that effort. Its main, but not its only, subject is European travel and exploration writing, analysed in connection with European economic and political expansion since around 1750. The book aims to be botha study in genre and a critique of ideology. Its predominant theme is how travel books written by Europeans about non-European parts of the world created the imperial order for Europeans“at home" and gave them their place in it. I ask how travl writing made imperial expansion meaningful and desirable to the citizenries of the imperial countries, even though the material benefits of empire accrued mainly to the few. Travel books, I argue, gave European reading publics a sense of ownership, entitlement and familiarity with respect to the distant parts of the world that were being explored, invaded, invested in, and colonized. Travel books were very popular. They created a sense of curiosity, excitement, adventure, and even moral fervor about European expansionism. They were, I argue, one of the key instruments that made people "at home" in Europe feel part of a planetary project; a key instrument, in other words, in creating the "domestic subject" of empire. 

In these case studies I make a strong methodological assumption: thar important historical transitions alter the way people write, because they alter people's experiences and the way people imagine, feel and think about the world they live in. The shifts in writing, then, will tell you somethinp about the nature of the changes. Such shifts in writing, if they are historicaly profound, affect more than one genre. That fact made it important to ask how the shifts that took place in travel writing intersected with other forms of knowledge and expression. The book begins, for example, by considering how European travel writing interacted with enlightenment natural history to produce a Eurocentered form of global or "planetary" consciousness. I consider the classificatory schemes of natural history in relation to the vernacular peasant knowledges they sought to displace. Later, scientifc and sentimental travel writing are discussed as paired, bourgeois forms of authority that supersede older traditions of survival literature. Within the sentimental mode, relations are drawn between travel narrative and slave

It is as if he were speaking of ambassadors and empire. What I want: is, of course, that in quite a significant way, he was. As Christianity had in motion a global labor of religious conversion that asserted itself at to argue set t every point of contact with other societies, so natural history set in motis n a secular, global labor that, among other things, made contact zones a site of intellectual as well as manual labor, and installed there the distinction between the two. At the same time, the Linnaean systematizing project had a markedly democratic dimension, popularizing scientific inquiry as it had never been popularized before. *Linnaeus," as one present-day commenta- tor puts it, "was above all a man for the non-professional." His dream was that "with his method it would be possible for anyone who had learned the system to place any plant anywhere in the world in its right class and order, if not in its right genus, whether the plant was previously known to science or not.

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