ABSTRACT

Modern travel has been associated with youth from the seventeenth century grand tours of aristocratic sons (Urry, 1990:4) to the Wandervogel generation that formed the 1920s German youth movement (Janik and Toulman, 1973:204). The tradition continues today amongst British youth in the form of the ‘year out’ from higher education or time off from flexible ‘McJobs’ and short term contracts. Ceri, in her midtwenties and just returned from a month in Peru, shows how important a part travel can play in youth identity, leading to questions about the sort of person that travel enables her to be, and the sort of travel experiences she needs if she is to feel as though she has the identity she wants. This chapter is about the links between travel and identity, looking at how Ceri and other young travellers ‘frame’ the places they visit as containing experiences. It is also about how they bring these experiences back home to use in the narration of identity. Travel is one way in which youth identities ‘stretch out’

beyond the local to draw in places from around the globe. But, to follow the quote from Dean MacCannell, the ‘framing’ used by travellers forms part of the complex power relations between the West and its global Others in the ‘Third World’, and the ‘framings’ used by young travellers are no exception. The power of Western representations of the ‘Third World’ has been recognised in geography for some time, particularly in the context of nineteenth century British colonialism. Although Western imperial domination of the colonised world relied on the military power to conquer, it also drew on an imagination of the world which supported and legitimised Western control. Western colonial projects were based in the power to define Others as different. Understandings of such Othering emerged largely from Said’s study of the representations of Orientalism, which, he argues, justified European hegemony over the Orient by representing it as ‘backward’ or ‘irrational’ compared with Europe’s ‘maturity’ and ‘objectivity’ (1978:7). The West’s representations are perhaps not as homogeneous as Said suggests (Driver, 1992:33), and subsequent studies of colonial discourse have uncovered other versions, for example Nochlin (1991) describes the mysterious and erotic East painted by nineteenth century French artists. What these representations share in common is firstly an imagination of the ‘Third World’ as Other and different from the self, and secondly an assumption that this difference can be understood, described, known and re-presented in an objective fashion by the West. Two general points to draw from colonial discourse theory are, firstly, that representations of the Other and their fixing of difference are somehow linked to the interests of Western power, and secondly, that they have material consequences for the place represented because representations are lived as reality, informing the practices of Westerners in the Third World’.