Thanks again for a truly stellar discussion last night. I'm impressed with everyone's contributions and engagement with the course texts and themes this early in the semester. I think the excellent work on the blog posts helped us have such a good conversation, so keep up the good work with your 12-minute writes.
The readings will shift toward the theoretical for the next two weeks. This week's reading assignment, posted as .pdfs at UASOnline, should allow us to return to some of the questions surrounding privilege and the form(s) of travel writing, while also moving us into a closer consideration of the related issues of how travel is informed by discourses of race and gender. The reading assignment is shorter in terms of pages, but more demanding in terms of content, so be prepared to spend about the same amount of time on the reading as last week. Additionally, be looking for citations and hints for further reading to help you select the text for next week's disciplinary reading day. Your charge for week four, again, is to find a text from your academic discipline that helps us further theorize travel. I'd recommend doing a few searches now as well, just in case the materials you want are only available via interlibrary loan.
Until next week, happy reading.
Concerning the question of the different forms of travel and how the personal background influences the writing, Pratt posed several questions concerning the idea that “travel writing has produced ‘the rest of the world.’” In essence, the idea is that what people write is what people believe about a place or a people. For some, those travel readings will be the only contact there is with a particular place or people. On another level, there was the idea in Said’s Orientalism that there could be a problem with distortion or inaccuracy. This brought to mind what we discussed in class about what we wanted to read, and the majority of people agreed that we would rather read something that has enough detail to take us to that place in our minds. Said brings up the idea that those details could be clouding the perspective of the reader. It could actually be detrimental to the writing.
ReplyDeleteSo where is the balance? How does one write about a place while leaving personal values and experiences out of the description to the extent it could be detrimental. In my mind, ethnography would fit there, and it would be a good balance for travel writing. With that said, I don’t know if it is completely possible to entirely eliminate bias. No matter how objective a person wants to be there is inevitably going to be a general focus and therefore their background is going to influence how the write. Clifford hinted at this in his discussion about Ghosh’s statement “Every man in [the village] was a traveler.” Cliffored points out that there is no mention of women in this statement. Perhaps Ghosh did not spend as much time observing the women’s travel in the village, but in any case, there is no definite explanation because that is not what Ghosh wrote about. His personal focus has created an identity for the Egyptian village he was studying, and as a result, this view is what people who read Ghosh’s account will believe about these people. He has created an identity for them that could be inaccurate based on how he chose to write about them.
This is just one example because there are countless others. In light of that, it is something that people have to be aware of when they are reading travel writing because the personal bias that may have been unintentionally inserted into the writing could be giving a clouded view of the people or place.
Many questions can be pulled from the texts for this week. Travel writing’s history of colonialist thought – in combination with those subjugated by it – was a main theme. Clifford’s definition of contact zones (7) in connection with the performance of culture (9) seemed to resonate through Said’s questions about recognizing individuality in Orientalism (9) and Campbell’s realization that “(t)he old motifs of the journey – home, departure, destination, the liminal space between – have lost their reference in the lived experience of most people who are not tourists” (263). True, the colonialism that exists today is not the same as what was in its beginnings, but it still exists and impacts so many lives; with globalization, the argument could be made that it impacts every life. And the more interesting question: “(h)ow have Europe’s constructions of subordinated others been shaped by those others…?” (Pratt 6).
ReplyDeleteSaid’s discussion about the meanings of the words “Orient” and “Orientalism” are particularly applicable today, because in every piece of travel writings’ attempts to describe a place, there must be some generalization – some analogies, some references to history (colonialism) or cultures. If the references aren’t clearly stated, then they’re implied or carried subliminally by the author. “How then to recognize individualidty and to reconcile it with its intelligent, and by no means passive or merely dictatorial, general and hegemonic context?” (9). This was my main thinking point for these readings; where does the individual – author or reader – exist, move through spaces, and express him/herself (as always a part of colonialism’s infinitely varied manifestations and impacts) through travel writing today?
All of these texts situate travel in the context of human culture and suggest that the genre of travel writing has purely cultural motives and purposes. Is travel an inherently cultural act? Can we define travel and travel writing outside of human culture?
ReplyDeleteIn many cases I think we travel for reasons beyond the many cultures and cultural constructs we’ll encounter. Popular travel destinations, such as Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, the Redwoods, or the Great Barrier Reef are arguably just pure geographical forms, landscapes and wildlife without any cultural displays. (However, I see the counterargument that because as people we have chosen not to alter or develop these places, we made a cultural decision and they are now in some way part of our culture… maybe.) While these readings discuss historic travel involving colonialism or “exotic otherness,” I think many of us travel to get away from people and civilization, to get to the wild, to witness the acts and creations of nature. Would this yield valid travel writing, or just nature writing? There are many unique ecosystems around the world worth traveling to and worth writing about. Although the process of traveling of course involves culture - transportation, countries, borders, names, etc - I think meaningful travel writing can be produced without the catalyst of cultural exploration/conquest.
As Said invites that the Orient and the Occident or the East vs West ideals are man-made quantities, created because they could be and submitted to be the way they are, and that they have changed and are continuing to change as time passes, I further that travel in itself may be man-made and also progresses with the plod of man. Campbell said that after travel writing began gaining academic attention, its ideas spread across spectrums of people, and history became composed of multiple facets and points of view due to the inherent nature to learn and grow from travel. If this is true, and travel and travel writing are evolving quantities that change not only the people who visit other places, but the people back home studying the literature of those places, then is not the world in itself turning into a mixing pot of ideas and concepts? Are we steadily learning more and more of the world as technology and communication expands? Will travel then continue to grow as an essence? Or will the continued stirring of the pot evolve into one large, similar plane of being, making travel less exciting and “discoverable”? What is the future of travel?
ReplyDeleteI submit that because travel is about the idea of doing things that haven’t been done before and going somewhere else to find your place, that it will continue to grow in commodity. No matter how great knowledge concludes to be, there is nothing like being in the essence of a different culture and learning about it first-hand. I think that no matter how much we bring back with us, culture in one place will continue to grow and expand and differ from cultures in other areas. The pot may continue to stir and mix, but new spices are added to different regions each moment. As time passes, we may find the logistics of travel become faster, easier, and more comfortable, but the experience will never diminish.
Jessika (Bambi) Caudy
ReplyDeleteSeptember 14, 2015
This week’s articles on the theory of travel focused mainly on the consequences of travel writing and the effect it has on readers when considering the rest of the world. My main question is, how does privilege determine how our ethnocentric view of the world develops?
We have already established that in order to travel, one must have privilege and wealth. In the articles we have read this week we discovered that this trend has been repeated throughout the course of history (Columbus traveling to the new world, world leaders conquering new lands, etc.). Because of the privilege necessary for travel, we might say that the views formed about a place of travel are coming from one type of source, the wealthy, the privileged, and the powerful.
The articles explored the implications of travel writing on the general person’s view of the “other” parts of the world in relation to our own. In a sense, we might say that the general population’s views on the world are based almost entirely off of the first-hand accounts of the privileged. Campbell states that we have a “difficulty of imagining or representing the Other”. We base what we know and believe on the accounts of others who have traveled.
Even museums and their implications on the perceived notions of the world were discussed in the articles. One might look at Columbus’s journals from his travels to the now Americas and understand the natives to be intrusive savages. We are inclined to believe his accounts because of his power and influence in the new world, shaping the views of others, Campbell calls this “authority of speech”. His views, as well as our modern views of the foreign, were based completely out of his own biased privilege and represented as such.
Often when we retell what we experience as we travel, we take on an ethnocentric lens guiding what we perceive to be cultured, civilized, etc. as compared to our own culture. When we spread these perceptions and experiences, we therefore influence others to believe our own experiences to be true. In a way we shape the view of a foreign place in our world in which we base all our corresponding actions towards that said place. After we accept a view, we enforce that view back onto the same foreign culture, creating a cycle of misinterpretations and “conflict at contact zones” in which we travel. Our views of the world outside our own are based solely on perceptions of the privileged that can and will travel to faraway places, and their subsequent writings. Even when we travel to that same place to view the other world for ourselves, we approach this place with an expectation to match the writings we read, recreating the cycle of misinterpretations.
We are creatures who seek out what we already believe to be true to reaffirm our judgements about a place in which others have traveled. In a way, travel through privilege shapes political views and affects nearly all opinions about a place visited for a few brief moments.
After reading this week’s assigned theoretical texts, I went back through my notes on the different terms brought up throughout these essays and one in particular stood out to me from Said’s "Orientalism":
ReplyDelete“The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences” (Said 1).
This conversation of how an imperialistic and colonizing force can invent a place, its people and its culture goes even deeper in Mary Louise Pratt’s "Imperial Eyes". In the introduction to her book, Pratt questions how European travel and exploration writing produced “the rest of the world”. The reading for this week would suggest that Euroimperialism has shaped the rest of the world in the language of difference. I can certainly see places in both literature and film where this process of cultural differentiation is done in varying degrees to make Western culture seem superior to those it wishes to exert control over.
I wish I could say that this “culture production” via travel writing isn’t a tool of imperialistic thought today, but I don’t have to look far at all to see that it’s still in bookstores today. To look at this question on a local scale, I’d like to ask how both European and American travel/exploration writing has produced Alaska? Looking back at the first quote that stood out to me in Said's work, I can see how his description of the Orient could also be applied to how Alaska is described in travel brochures today.
So have we used Alaska in the same way the European colonizing forces used the Orient, shaping our identity by placing ourselves opposite it? Or have we gone a step beyond the language of difference and begun to define ourselves through the appropriation of what Alaska is in “idea, personality, [and] experience” (Said 2)?
I couldn’t help but keep in touch with last week’s discussion as I read the readings this week. They all made vivid points in our concepts of travel and one in particular that really stood out to me was Clifford’s “Routes.” Does moving for the sake of your family or culture qualify as a definition of travel? We touched briefly on this during last week’s class but we didn’t really get too involved in it. Clifford says,
ReplyDelete“I had expected to find on that most ancient and most settled of soils a settled and restful people. I couldn’t have been more wrong”(1).
While this reading did not flat out say that it was about nomads, it did talk about culture and gender reasons for moving from place to place. There are many reasons why some cultures move from place to place, but do these constitute as travel? As Clifford says “travel emerged as an increasingly complex range of experiences”(3). This reminds me of what is a traveler versus a tourist. With the nature of its complexity can one really determine this? Some people do not pack up and relocate because of a want, but more so of a need. With the colonization and decolonization’s, movement, and travel,
“virtually everywhere one looks, the processes of human movement and encounter is long-established and complex. Cultural centers, discrete regions and territories, do not exist prior to contacts, but are substantiated through them, appropriating and disciplining the restless movements of people and things”(3).
The place in which we live is the way that it is due to the movement of people from other parts of the world. Clifford touches on “western modernization”(5) patterns of connection across the Indian ocean, Africa, and West Africa. Has travel been something far deeper and more complex far longer than we think?
The genre of travel writing as we know it is exclusively a Western phenomenon. That is not to say that traveling is universal, or that there aren’t stories of traveling all over the world, but the form and function of “travel writing” as we know it, and all of the texts we are studying in the class, is Western. So we should be discussing privilege and common tropes, and how the “other” (non-Western) is framed in travel writing. Kevin mentioned two things that I thought were curious at the last class, and I hope he has more of a chance to share his thoughts, as he mentioned it at the end of class. He mentioned that he felt the travel writing didn’t quite follow common tropes, as we understand them, in travel writing. I’d like to discuss this using Pratt’s cogent analysis of the “‘anti-conquest’, by which I refer to the strategies of representation whereby European bourgeois subjects seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert European hegemony.” This is happening as we read a genre that entirely confined within the terms, worldview, socio-economic status, perspectives, language (if not English, at least Indo-Europoean) and narrative constructs of Westerners. I wonder if it still “assert(s) European hegemony” to discuss the radical UrbExers. The status quo seems to absorb its outsiders, or maybe the outsiders were feeding into the status quo all this time, as the UrbEx movement is documented in PhD dissertations and included in a bourgeois anthology of travel writing. Secondly, Kevin seemed to suggest that discussing privilege wasn’t a particularly rich topic of discussion, or important. I don’t know, I’d just like to ask about it in class. As we discuss a very privileged genre, with very definable boundaries of socio-economic status, worldviews and narrative frameworks, I think privilege is a relevant topic of discussion. Edward Said, Pratt and others helped to create the theoretical space for that discussion.
ReplyDeleteAs I was reading Pratt I thought of a few Native American stories in the oral tradition that subvert the travel genre as we know it. There is a man in Athabascan tradition whose name translates to “Traveler”. The Haida Raven story is called “Raven Traveling”. The Inupiaq have the epic of Qayaq, the Magic Traveler. Once you step outside a Western language and worldview, it really helps with your perspective. Western culture is no longer a universe in a nutshell. You don’t even need to travel very far to find this out.
The concern of privilege remains an issue here. In Campbell’s introduction we see the comment of the “Western Oppressor,” and what fits the bill of this issue. This also brings to mind the issue of colonization and later the idea of the Orient. In Said’s Orientalism we have the question of what creates the ‘other,’ thus bringing to mind the issue of colonialism and if Orientalism only exists because of Western travel and mindset. So, if is the traveler inherently committing attacks against other cultures without meaning to due to privilege, or is it merely a symptom of traveling itself?
ReplyDelete“There is very little consent to be found, for example, in the fact that Flaubert’s encounter with an Egyptian courtesan produced a widely influential model of the Oriental woman; she never spoke of herself, she never represented her emotions, presence or history,” (Said 6). This appears to be an issue of Western Privilege and how it affects other countries and how we view them. Leesha presented this idea with biases and how we approach others, and questioned if we’re able to shut that down. European mindset often takes front seat when traveling as we’re more likely to see individuals and take it upon ourselves to build an entire story for them, within this idea of the Orient. Nothing was different from us until we decided it was. Thus creating a separate entity from ourselves that could be used in writing.
It probably goes without saying that much of travel writing appears to have an air of superiority in it, for those doing the traveling. Often we see people speaking for others, when easily the others could have been quoted directly. The problem seems to be immediate assumptions as well as needing to take responsibility for ourselves when we travel. Is our immediate approach to travel creating more Orientalism or a rather backseat approach to culture?
I will admit, I was struggling a little to come up with a particular question for this week's post. The reading was pretty heavy, and I was trying to wrap my brain around it and make sure I understood it before asking a specific, overarching question. But then this morning in my history class, our professor asked a question that I thought was really relevant to the past week's readings: what are the geographic boundaries of whiteness?
ReplyDeleteThe answer that our professor almost immediately gave was, of course, there are no geographic boundaries of whiteness. But the idea alone reminded me of some of the things that Pratt and Campbell had said in their writing. Specifically for Pratt, she mentions this concept of the contact zone - "social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other" (Pratt, 4) - which, to me, seems like a very white anthropologist sort of concept.
I feel like, at least in the context of ancient exploration, "contact" was when white nationalists showed up in non-white peoples' native territories, but if it was flipped and non-white, none-bourgeois peoples ventured into white people territory, it was called "invasion." I think that this falls in with another term that Pratt discusses, "anti-conquest" - which, if I'm understanding her writing correctly, is a word used to sort of categorize that older style of travel writing where imperialist Europeans would write about their travels to non-European landscapes and how fascinating the landscapes and locals were, while their writing was also heavily laden with a type of innate assumed superiority.
I'm trying to think of how to connect this to our class and what we'll be reading and talking about tonight, but the closest thing I can immediately think of is that satirical piece on white people that we read during our first class. Certainly modern-day Europeans are no longer rampant nationalistic imperials, but I think that some of the same reasons that the satire was funny can be traced back to this old form of travel writing.
-L-
Last week we touch on a lot of different points all encompassed in the genre of travel writing and I think that these subjects will keep returning through out this class as they did in the readings for this week. I found that Pratt created a good description of where travel writing came from and how that has influenced the culture that surrounds travel writing today. Travel writing seams to have begun from European descriptions of colonization. The idea of "contact zones" that Pratt introduces highlights this. Colonization was the beginning of travel, but travel has morphed a great deal with the changing world. It is now a kind of expression of human experience that interacts with many other forms of expression. Sense travel has taken on so many different personalities and forms it makes it hard to answer the big question of "What is travel?"
ReplyDeleteTravel began has the search for new lands and I think one thing that this is something that can be said about modern travel. Modern travel is just much more on an individual basis. I think it may be beneficial for the question of “what is travel” to never be asked again. There is no answer of significance that will satisfy or exhaust the question. In Routes, Clifford says "But what would happen, I began to ask, if travel were untethered, seen as a complex and pervasive spectrum of human experience?" This is a wonderful question. If we drew away from how to travel the "right" way or what qualifies as traveling and began to instead accept that the range of human experiences encompassed in the word travel is to vast and broad to define maybe then we will know what travel really is and unconsciously we will find the answer to what travel is.
The views of travel that have lingered from the past can get us stuck in a place of confusion when we think of where travel exists now. “The old motifs…” as stated in Travel Writing and its theory by Campbell, are no longer necessary, yet we keep bringing them back. Yes, travel came about from privilege and to this day it is the privileged that get to have those extravagant human experiences that usually find there way to being popular travel writing, but just because that privilege has brought those experiences to the forefront of media and the idea of travel I do not think the rest of human experience can be left out. The stories or mad lips that we can create from travel highlight common themes in human experiences, but those common occurrences, although no less of an experience, are not what becomes great travel writing. Great travel writing comes from dropping those expectations and escaping the comfort of the known.
Travel creates whispers that can be heard from the other side of the globe like the glass globe Campbell mentions. Those whispers become voices and contribute to the knowledge about the world of the day.
Said asks, “In fine how can we treat the cultural, historical phenomenon of Orientalism as a kind of willed human work- not of mere unconditioned ratiocination—in all its historical complexity, detail, and worth without at the same time losing sight of the alliance between cultural work, political tendencies, the state, and the specific realities of domination?” When I read the part about the “willed human work”, I thought about how so many of us willingly buy into Orientalism through the tourist industry. I’m not bashing the tourists though—I want to ask what we see when we flip it around on ourselves, especially those of us who live in a tourist destination like Alaska. We benefit immensely from it! Tourist destinations are often, like the “Orient”, depicted in ways that allow another culture to “set itself off” against them. While Said points out the inherent power relationship in Orientalism, I kept thinking about how the image of the “Orient” (whichever place that may be) is used by the “Orient”, too. We have probably all seen this in Juneau, where “The Alaskan Experience” is sold. We may not “buy” the romanticism like the tourists because we have actual lives here and know that it’s not the glamorous experience that so often represents Alaska, but that doesn’t stop us from selling it to the tourist. We allow ourselves to be defined through Orientalism and use it to our advantage—doesn’t every “tourist destination”? I think there is a question of responsibility of representation that arises in this week’s readings on multiple levels within the binary of colonizer/colonized.
ReplyDeleteThis week’s reading relates heavily to culture and travel. This brings me back to another reading I had chosen for Literature and the Environment and my question of what constitutes travel writing. The reading from my other course focused on wilderness narratives, it was called “Defending Travel Writing (against Other Writers): The Case of Joe McGinniss's Going to Extremes,” by Gene McQuillan. McQuillan refers to travel writing “as a sort of unholy alliance between literature and leisure, as a series of texts written by generally well-fed and well-educated people who proceeded to voluntarily display all kinds of prejudice, selfishness, and even cruelties.” McQuillan even mentions Said’s Orientalism and Pratt’s Imperial Eyes as examples.
ReplyDeleteIn particular McQuillan’s biggest gripe falls to the tourist vs traveler argument, attempting to identify what audience it is that the travel writer is catering to. This brings me back to this week’s readings. They may be travel writings, but what other categories may they fall under at the bookstore? Ethnographies. History. Anthropology. Does this mean that all ethnographic, historical, and anthropologic texts that include travel constitute also as travel writing? Do these writings entice readers in the same way? Are they telling a story in order to transport the reader to the particular place? My answer would be yes. However, would they be enticing the reader to have the longing to visit the particular place? I do not think this is their intent; instead it is to capture the place and preserve the culture in historical text, through oral history in the sense of story. Yet it is to be noticed in this case, who the writer is and their background along with the subject with which they are writing about, and brings me back to the original quote by McQuillan and travel writing.
-Victoria
The readings from this week talked about how culture and travel affect one another. I think it is really interesting to look at how travel has changed over time and how travel is related to history. In the past people traveled from place to place for much different reasons than we do today. I wonder if part of the desire to travel now relates to the not always voluntary travel of the past. Many people travel to experience another culture and things of historical importance in another place. I think that travel now may help us feel connected to people who we have never met and lived long before us. It is a way for us to feel connected to other people across barriers of time and space. The main type of travel that reminds me of this concept is a pilgrimage to a place of religious significance or people going to the country that their ancestors came from to feel closer to them and to learn more about themselves in the process.
ReplyDeleteNice reading selections! As always, it seems like things boil down to a discussion of power and agency. Who has it, what do they do with it, how does it effect others. Sometimes it feels like the custom is to view the world by the beam of a flashlight in the dark, as if the world "out there" is a passive thing, waiting to be discovered. Or maybe, as Clifford states, it's a museum sort of way of looking. We forget that the other is a source of agency and power as well. Any kind of looking is a participation, and even when we are otherwise occupied, the world goes on changing and evolving. Travel writing, then, can present a challenge to our observations and knowledge, by letting the other contribute. Even in the case of a mythos as dogmatic as the European West's Orientalism, there was a discourse that was also shaped by the "Orient" itself. London is as much an frisson of cultures as Hong Kong. When you're used to being, "just me," the normal, the narrator, the white, you forget that.
ReplyDeleteHow does travel writing change our discourse? I guess it would be the difference between flying the bush plane over the "uncontacted tribe" and going to meet them, being chastened as your ideas of the other has heard all about cell phones and five lane highways.
In Orientalism by Said, as well as Imperial Eyes by Pratt, the overarching theme is that of the relationship between societies when one ventures into another’s geographic and cultural space. This can be said about Clifford’s Routes as well. This introduction to the theoretical study and understanding of travel underlines the ebb and flow of cultural connection – its assembly, history, future, byproducts, and consequences. In the Prologue of Routes, Clifford states that, “Cultural action, the making and remaking of identities, takes place in the contact zones (p. 7).” The term “contact zones” comes up again in Pratt’s Imperial Eyes as she describes the term to mean, “the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict (p. 7).” The interesting dichotomy between Said’s use of “contact zone” and Pratt’s is the heavy undertone. Yes, Said does speak in depth about negative global forces such as, “the continuing legacies of empire, the effects of unprecedented world wars, and the global consequences of industrial capitalism’s disruptive, restructuring activity (p. 7).” However, he does postulate a more hopeful meaning to the translation of travel. My question is, now that Western institution is being proliferated more now than ever, with the extreme being that is the internet, is it possible that the 21st century will evoke an overall homogenized global-culture?
ReplyDeleteThis is a question I am saving for class this evening – I have thoughts on it, but would like to hear the input of my colleagues before delving further into it.
Imperial Eyes by Pratt posed some geographical criticisms of travel which resonated strongly with me. Pratt developes the phrase "contact zones" in which are "social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination..." (Pratt 4). This concept of contact zones brings to mind and I would suspect is influenced by Hegelian phenomenology, and bears striking resemblance to the master-slave dialectic. Pratt argues that the act of travel produces concepts of the "rest of the world" as differentiated by that which is familiar, specifically in colonial and oppressive states of intercultural interaction. Pratt uses the terms autoethnograpy, and transculturation to theorize what occurs in a contact zone, and can be utilized as aspects of the master-slave dialectic. Autoethhnography refers to the way in which "colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer's own terms", while transculturation is a phenomenon used to "describe how subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture". Thinking of these two terms, to bring it back to Hegel, I am reminded of how the slave is subordinant to the master so that he is the producer in a culture to the extent that only he or she (the slave) understands the process of cultural creation. What this means in specific circumstances, is that in historically colonial areas, true access to the knowledge of cultural creation is inaccessible through the dominant power's modes of knowledge; it is to say, the hegemony of the dominant post-colonial class, renders that demographic locked out of certain ways of knowing. This relates back to travel because we the middle class view travel, often, as a way of knowing, which may be itself a method of hegemony which we are duped by.
ReplyDelete