ABSTRACT
A common aesthetic feature in the genre of travel literature has been the use of “foreign” and “exotic” words, which sometimes serve the purpose of creating titillating levels of foreignness and adventure. This chapter takes its point of departure in Nordic travel literature with a particular focus on the Norwegian author Kjartan Fløgstad’s book Pampa Unión. Latinamerikanske reiser (1994; Pampa Unión: Latin American Travels). It includes thirty-eight short texts which portray the narrator’s encounters with Latin American societies and cultures, peoples and languages in a previously colonized territory. Where the ethnocentric travelogues of past centuries often described an encounter with the exotic Other, Fløgstad’s late 20th-century traveller states that he himself is the Other. In Kleveland’s reading, Pampa Unión turns languages and their borders into the main topic, whereby the protagonist’s own language is dislocated from the linguistic centre of the journey. However, regardless of Fløgstad’s efforts to challenge the colonial power discourses, Kleveland demonstrates how the colonial wound often hinders the traveller-narrator from fulfilling this quest.
