Julian Fałat in Southeast Asia

In his Pamiętniki (Memoirs), Julian Fałat—who was born, educated, and spent most of his life in the Austro-Hungarian Empire—depicted an 1885 trip round the world, of which South East Asia was the most prominent part. This study focuses on the “hybridity” involved in the construction of Fałat’s identity in his memoirs. The tools which have been developed by postcolonial studies will be used to analyze the ways in which Fałat portrayed himself and the people he encountered on the trip: his fellow travelers, the crews on the ships he travelled on, and, last but not least, the local people he met there. In Orientalism (1978) Edward Said employed Michel Foucault’s concept of discourse to describe “Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient.” ¹ Said used travel narratives of eminent French and British writers such as Gérard Nerval, Gustave Flaubert, and Richard Francis Burton (narratives concerning travels undertaken by Europeans to the Orient in the same historical period when Fałat was making his trip) and claimed that travel books were crucial in constructing the Orientalist discourse as they “are about as ‘natural’ a kind of text, as logical in their composition and in their use, as any book one can think of.” ²