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Travel Writing at the End of Empire: A Pom Named Bruce and the Mad White Giant

2003; University of Western Ontario Libraries; Volume: 29; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/esc.2003.0039

1913-4835

Douglas Ivison,

Philippine History and Culture

Travel Writing at the End of Empire: A Pom Named Bruce and the Mad W hite Giant Douglas Ivison Lakehead University T he pr a c t ic e of travel w r it in g , 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 expansion­ ism. A s Sara Mills points out inDiscourses ofDifference, for manyrecent crit­ ics (that is since the appearance of Edward Said's Orientalism [1978]), "travel writing is essentially an instrument within colonial expansion and served to reinforce colonial rule once in place" (2). Travel books were essential to European imperialism in that they implicated their readers vicariously in the imperialist project. Mary Louise Pratt's influential ImperialEyes shows "how travel books by Europeans about non-European parts ofthe world went (and go) about creating the "domestic subject" of Euroimperialism; how they have engaged metropolitan reading publics with (or to) expansionist enterprises whose material benefits accrued mainly to the very few" (4). Travel narratives, as part of what David Spurr has called "the rhetoric of empire," provided imperial administrators with information about the fur­ thest reaches of the Empire (or beyond), facilitating the Empire's expansion and administration, while constituting "the Empire" for its readers. These narratives allowed Europeans, most of whom would never set foot in the ESC 29.3-4 (September/December 2003): 200-219 places described, to imagine a vast Empire of which "they" were in control. As Ann Laura Staler shows inRace and theEducation ofDesire, the imperial project was essential to the constitution of identities—racial, sexual, and national. Travel, which "denotes a range of material, spatial practices that produce knowledges, stories, traditions, comportments, musics, books, dia­ ries, and other cultural expressions" (Clifford 35), repeatedly reconstituted the Empire and imperial identities through the necessarily repetitive nature of its performance. Furthermore, the genre oftravel writing, particularly the subgenre that we might call "adventure travel,"1 was the cultural by-product of imperialism, often written by those actively involved in the expansion or maintenance ofthe Empire (explorers, soldiers, administrators, missionaries, journalists), and dependent upon the support ofthe institutions of imperial­ ism in order to facilitate the writers' travels. Travel and travel writing are determined by and determine gender, racial identity, national identity, economic status and a host of other interrelated markers of status and privilege. Travel is inextricably implicated in "a his­ tory of European, literary, male, bourgeois, scientific, heroic, recreational meanings and practices" (Clifford 33), and simultaneously invokes and dis­ avows those connotations in producing the travelling subject. Some of the socio-cultural markings implied by the term "travel" are illustrated in the following passage from a guide to adventure travel: Take, for exam ple, M anhattan w riter Fran Lebowitz, w ho defines the outdoors as "a place you m ust pass through in ord er to get from your apartm ent into a taxicab." To Fran, a tw enty-m inute w alk through the N ew Jersey suburbs w ould qualify as an adven­ turous undertaking, fraught w ith the risk of falling branches, the unforeseeable danger o f Lym e disease, and the unexpected excitem ent o f an en coun ter w ith a squirrel. To m oun tain eer R einhold M essner, on the oth er hand, an expedition to the Douglas Ivison is an Assistant Professor at Lakehead University. He is the editor of Canadian Fantasy and ScienceFiction Writers (2002), a volume of the Dictionary of Literary Biography, and has published articles on John Richardson, Herman Melville, Hugh Hood, Thomas Pynchon, August Wilson, Raoul Whitfield, and EnglishCanadian popular music. His current research includes work on spatial practices in adventure literature, the urban in Canadian literature, and the vernacular narrator in Australian fiction. 1 By adventure travel I mean travel that is set at or beyond the margins of "civiliza­ tion" (such as that by the Victorian explorer and travel writer, Richard Burton, for example). This is in opposition to travels to or within the centre of "civilization" (e.g. the Grand Tour, etc...