Mary Louise Pratt

How has travel writing produced "the rest of the world" for European readerships? How does one speak of transculturation from the colonies to the metropolis? Studies in colonial and exploration discourse have identified the enormous significance of travel writing as an ideological apparatus of Empire. The study of travel writing has, however, remained either naively celebratory or dismissive, treating texts as symptoms of imperial ideologies. Imperial Eyesexplores European travel and exploration writing, in connection with European economic and political expansion since 1700. It is both a study in genre, and a critique of ideology. Pratt examines how travel books by Europeans create the domestic subject of European imperialism, and how they engage metropolitan reading publics with expansionist enterprises whose material benefits accrued mainly to the very few. These questions are addressed through readings of particular travel accounts connected with particularhistorical transitions, from the eighteenth century to Paul Theroux: sentimental travel writing and its links with abolitionist rhetoric, discursive reinventions of South America during the period of its independence (1800-1840), and eighteenth-century European writings on Southern Africa in the context of inland expansion.

Travel Writing and Transculturation

Imperial Eyes

Laurence Favre

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

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. 

Imperial Eyes Travel Writing and Transculturation

Highlights