ABSTRACT

European travel writing, a corpus spanning several centuries, has been hugely influential in producing and circulating knowledge about the rest of the world and fuelling aspirations for expansion and conquest. Travel and travel writing, and the imaginative geographies they conjured, were crucial to the discursive formation of empire, especially by their insinuation and cementation of crude binaries such as the West/the Rest, attached to which were the clearly pejorative formulations of civilised/savage, scientific/superstitious, and so on. This discursive formation did not innocently propose categories which simply allowed the West (a problematic homogeneity) to define itself against a projected other. Imperialist discourse was built on a system of ideologically-informed asymmetrical relationships. In the context of travel and travel writing, the most significant of these were traveller/travellee, observer/observed, and narrator/narrated. Having science and empiricism on the western side of this divide might imply that a regime of ‘truth’ was being established, but scientific discovery in far-off places was commonly represented through earlier discursive structures of myth, romanticisation, and idealisation that had roots in Classical times. The melding of fact and fantasy in early modern travel writing especially is what allowed the ‘truth-regime’ of western knowledge about the rest of the world to present itself as fact while inculcating particular imperialist ideologies. Prior to this systematic distortion, and crucial to European imperialist projects, was European mobility, through which knowledge was garnered and returned, often haphazardly, to imperial centres, where it was refined, systematised, and used to inform further exploration and discovery. As knowledge was mobilised, so were the imagination and the desire for far-off places, and this provided huge demand for travel writing where the West assumed the narrative authority to represent ‘the Rest’. A further effect of western mobility on the discursive terrains of empire was to produce another binarism: the West’s mobility, science, and (modern) progress opposing the historical and geographical stasis of ‘the Rest’. The uneven development of travel and exploration (and travel writing) provided the West with both literal and

figurative mobility, and this gave imperialist discourse its vigour and means of dissemination.