ABSTRACT
In The World, the Text and the Critic Edward Said put forward a concept which has come to have a wide currency in post-colonial studies, that of travelling theory. Said explained that just as people travelled, so too did theory. As a move into a new environment is ‘never unimpeded’, this ‘complicates any account of the transplantation, transference, circulation and commerce of theories and ideas’. 1 Theories, like visuality and modernity, are culturally, geographically and historically specific. Recent studies have also transformed the understanding of travel, Inderpal Grewal critiquing the term itself: ‘as a universal form of mobility [travel] erases or conflates those mobilities that are not part of this Eurocentric, imperialist formation’, such as migration, immigration, deportation, indenture and slavery. 2 Discussions of nineteenth-century travel and its cultural products (guidebooks, images, travel narratives, maps) have placed emphasis on the intersections between imperialism and visuality. Mary Louise Pratt’s analysis of a visual trope which she called ‘the monarch-of-all-I-survey’ drew attention to the need for the imperial metropolis ‘to present and represent its peripheries and its others continually to itself. 3 John Urry has traced the development of ‘eyewitness observation’ with its increasing visualisation of experience and the significance and complexity of ‘the tourist gaze’. 4 Travel provided a means for understanding self, society and nation; indeed, Grewal emphasises that ‘no work on travel can exclude the important matter of subject formation, ideology and imperialism’. Interrupting the binaries of self/other, home/away allows for an understanding that the ‘space of colonial encounters’ was located not just in ‘the so-called peripheries, but in the colonial metropolis itself. 5 This chapter and the one that follows track travelling feminists, theories and culture to explore the links between travel and subjectivity, visuality and modernity which were central to the imperial project.
