Travel and Ethics: Theory and Practice

275 Pages·2014·3.994 MB·English

by  Corinne Fowler (editor), Charles Forsdick (editor), Ludmilla Kostova (editor)

Travel and Ethics
Despite the recent increase in scholarly activity regarding travel writing
and the accompanying proliferation of publications relating to the form,
its ethical dimensions have yet to be theorised with suffi cient rigour. Draw-
ing from the disciplines of anthropology, linguistics, literary studies and
modern languages, the contributors in this volume apply themselves to a
number of key theoretical questions pertaining to travel writing and eth-
ics, ranging from travel-as-commoditisation to encounters with minority
languages under threat. Taken collectively, the essays assess key critical
legacies from parallel disciplines to the debate so far, such as anthropologi-
cal theory and postcolonial criticism. Also considered, and of equal signifi -
cance, are the ethical implications of the form’s parallel genres of writing,
such as ethnography and journalism. As some of the contributors argue,
innovations in these genres have important implications for the act of theo-
rising travel writing itself and the mode and spirit in which it continues to
be conducted. In the light of such innovations, how might ethical theory
maintain its critical edge?
Corinne Fowler lectures in Postcolonial Literature at the University of
Leicester, UK.
Charles Forsdick is James Barrow Professor of French at the University of
Liverpool, UK.
Ludmilla Kostova is Associate Professor of British Literature and Cultural
Studies at the University of Veliko Turnovo, Bulgaria.
Routledge Research in Travel Writing
EDITED BY PETER HULME, University of Essex, and TIM YOUNGS,
Nottingham Trent University
1 Travel Writing, Form, and
Empire
The Poetics and Politics of
Mobility
Edited by Julia Kuehn
and Paul Smethurst
2 Visualizing Africa in Nineteenth-
Century British Travel Accounts
Leila Koivunen
3 Contemporary Travel Writing of
Latin America
Claire Lindsay
4 Travel Writing and Atrocities
Eyewitness Accounts of
Colonialism in the Congo, Angola,
and the Putumayo
Robert M. Burroughs
5 Transnational Russian-
American Travel Writing
Margarita D. Marinova
6 Travel Narratives in Translation,
1750–1830
Nationalism, Ideology, Gender
Edited by Alison E. Martin
and Susan Pickford
7 Travel and Ethics
Theory and Practice
Edited by Corinne Fowler,
Charles Forsdick, and
Ludmilla Kostova
Travel and Ethics
Theory and Practice
Edited by Corinne Fowler,
Charles Forsdick, and
Ludmilla Kostova
NEW YORK LONDON
First published 2014
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 2014 Taylor & Francis
The right of Corinne Fowler, Charles Forsdick, and Ludmilla Kostova to
be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for
their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
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registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Travel and ethics : theory and practice / edited by Corinne Fowler, Charles
Forsdick, & Ludmilla Kostova.
pages cm. — (Routledge Research in Travel Writing ; 7)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Travelers’ writings—Moral and ethical aspects. 2. Travel writing—
History. 3. Literature and morals. 4. Postcolonialism—Social
aspects. I. Fowler, Corinne, editor of compilation. II. Forsdick,
Charles, editor of compilation. III. Kostova, Ludmilla, editor of
compilation.
PN56.T7T676 2013
809'.93327—dc23
2013003051
ISBN13: 978-0-415-99539-9 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-203-76409-1 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by IBT Global.
Contents
Introduction: Ethics on the Move 1
CHARLES FORSDICK, CORINNE FOWLER, AND LUDMILLA KOSTOVA
1 Speech Acts: Language, Mobility and Place 16
MICHAEL CRONIN
2 From Legislative to Interpretive Modes of Travel: Space, Ethics,
and Literary Form in Jean Baudrillard’s America 31
GILLIAN JEIN
3 Fiction and Aff ect: Anglophone Travel Writing and the Case of
Paraguay 52
CORINNE FOWLER
4 Terror 77
LAURIE HOVELL MCMILLIN
5 Victor Segalen in the Contact Zone: Exoticism, Ethics, and the
Traveler and “Travelee” 91
CHARLES FORSDICK
6 Ethical Encounters with Animal Others in Travel Writing 108
JOPI NYMAN
7 Cultural Sustainability and Postcolonial Island Literatures 128
ANTHONY CARRIGAN
vi Contents
8 Gourdes and Dollars: How Travel Writers Spend Money 150
ALASDAIR PETTINGER
9 Writing across the Native/Foreign Divide: The Case of Kapka
Kassabova’s Street Without a Name 165
LUDMILLA KOSTOVA
10 “Like a Member of a Free Nation, He Wrote Without Shame”:
Foreign Travelers as a Trope in Romanian Cultural Tradition 183
ALEXANDER DRACE-FRANCIS
11 Travelling the Times of Empire 204
SYED MANZURUL ISLAM
12 The Rhetorics of Arctic Discourse: Reading Gretel Ehrlich’s
This Cold Heaven in Class 216
JAN BORM
13 Hauntings: W.G. Sebald as Travel Writer 231
GRAHAM HUGGAN
Bibliography 243
List of Contributors 259
Index 263
Introduction
Ethics on the Move
Charles Forsdick, Corinne Fowler,
and Ludmilla Kostova
TRAVEL WRITING SCHOLARSHIP
The study of travel writing has emerged rapidly over the past three decades
as a thriving cross-disciplinary fi eld that has made an increasingly active
contribution to the internationalization of research practices in the human-
ities and social sciences. The area of research has been consolidated by the
development of those institutions and structures on which the sustainabil-
ity and further development of the diverse activity federated under such
a title depends: journals, textbooks and other reference works, scholarly
associations, and book series.
Studying travel writing allows the student or researcher the fl exibil-
ity to draw on a range of other disciplines, theories, and concepts; at the
same time analyzing a textual form that is inherently transcultural per-
mits critical dialogues that are themselves often powerfully comparative
and cross-cultural. Travel writing has long been an object of academic
inquiry, although customarily reduced to source material in fi elds such as
history and geography. Those who studied the form as a genre in its own
right tended to focus on individual travel writers, or to be interested in the
importance of the travelogue to the history of the book. Scholars such as
Percy Adams underlined the centrality of travel writing to the emergence
of modern European literature,1 privileging the links between such texts
and a key genre such as the novel. Nonetheless, the relative assumptions of
literary value allocated to each literary form, and the generic hierarchies
that accordingly emerged, seem for a long time to have impeded the wider
consideration of travel narratives as a literary form in their own right.
Contemporary attention to travel writing can be traced to wider shifts
in humanities scholarship in the postwar period. The challenge to a well-
established canon in literary studies, and the associated prizing open of a
wider range of fi elds to subaltern—or at least less dominant—voices, permitted
attention to be directed to source material previously dismissed as paralit-
erary or journalistic—and relegated to the library stacks alongside many
other examples of the “great unread”. The rejection of generic and hege-
monic canonicity—and by association that of archival authority—in favor
2 Charles Forsdick, Corinne Fowler, and Ludmilla Kostova
of recovering alternative voices, or other (hi)stories “from below”, permitted
both the excavation of forgotten texts and the creation of new approaches to
other material around which critical orthodoxies had crystallized.
Although often cited as a foundational text in postcolonial studies,
Edward Said’s Orientalism is perhaps more accurately understood as the
text that triggered—through its contribution to the fi eld of colonial dis-
course studies—renewed interest in the travelogue as a literary form wor-
thy of attention in its own right.2 Said’s work managed to crystallize a
series of intellectual currents that lent themselves to study of this cultural
form, evident also in the work of anthropologists such as Talal Asad and
James Cliff ord,3 as well as in the more general focus among early postcolo-
nial critics on the practices of constructing and controlling diff erence that
Gayatri Spivak dubbed “othering”. Simplifying such critical approaches,
Terry Eagleton sees in them the risk of an intellectual dead-end:
The bad news is that otherness is not the most fertile of intellectual
furrows. Indeed, once you have observed that the other is typically
portrayed as lazy, dirty, stupid, crafty, womanly, passive, rebellious,
sexually rapacious, childlike, enigmatic and a number of other mutu-
ally contradictory epithets, it is hard to know what to do next apart
from reaching for another textual illustration of the fact.4
While Eagleton’s critique is pertinent for certain reductive approaches to
colonial discourse, according to which scholars comb travel narratives to
identify and confi rm preexisting sets of stereotypes, such a presentation is
more a parody of studies in travel writing than an accurate refl ection of the
activity the fi eld has allowed. Eagleton does not, for instance, refl ect the
more attenuated attention to the historically and geographically grounded
approaches to the textualization of travel that is evident in some of the ear-
liest responses to Said—notably, those of Dennis Porter.5
The rapid expansion and evolution of studies in travel writing in the
anglophone academy resulted in a clear move from an emphasis on colonial
discourse in the 1980s toward an active and nuanced engagement in the
1990s with the complexities of the wider discourses of cultures and travel.
While other national traditions of studies in travel writing evolved along dif-
ferent lines, with many French scholars focusing, for instance, on questions
of intertexuality and genericity, English-language research tended to draw
on postcolonial criticism and gender studies to foreground issues of identity
and voice. Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes, which appeared in 1992,6
encouraged increasing attention—through its development of notions such
as the “contact zone” and the “travelee” (the person who inhabits the cul-
ture through which the traveler passes and who is accordingly “traveled
over”)—to the dynamics of travel writing, foregrounding attention to such
phenomena as autoethnography and the instability of identity as examined
in the work of Cliff ord. A series of major texts have been published over the
Introduction 3
past two decades, suggestively positing the creative potential of the encoun-
ter of travel writing with other key fi elds in the contemporary humanities
and social science research, such as gender studies,7 translation studies,8
and ecocriticism.9
Although many of these approaches contain an implicitly ethical dimen-
sion and are often even motivated by a loosely ethical imperative to challenge
dominant voices and explore alternative modes of intercultural contact and
communication, the open, active, and enabling engagement of studies in
travel writing with questions of ethics remains largely undeveloped despite
the potential of such work to reinvigorate the fi eld and to expand the range
of audiences with which it can speak.
TRAVEL WRITING AND ETHICS
At the close of the twentieth century, one of the few studies of travel writing
to focus exclusively on ethics was published. Syed Manzurul Islam’s The Eth-
ics of Travel: From Marco Polo to Kafka levels a by now familiar charge at
travel writing10—namely, that it communicates more about the traveler than
about the country being visited.11 Islam’s essay for this volume responds to
travel writing’s evolving forms. In his earlier study, however, he wrote, “All
these intrepid travelers, despite moving so much and so far in space did not
seem to have traveled at all.”12 Islam’s critique is leveled at a “sedentary”
mode of travel, a mode that he argues has furthered the Orientalist project
by drawing clear distinctions between traveler and travelee. For Islam, as for
so many scholars of travel writing today, the process of othering that ensues
from this distinction represents the genre’s most unethical and enduring fea-
ture. Islam’s book focuses on the extent to which travel writing from the thir-
teenth century to the late twentieth both internalized and perpetuated a false
“logic of diff erence”, a logic that is embedded in the very metaphor of travel
itself (p. 5). Islam’s concern in the book is the extent to which this metaphor
views the travelee as though she was a “daughte[r] of the soil” (p. 5). It is this
connotation of spatially bounded cultural subjectivity at the site of travel,
he argues, that gives rise to misleading notions of essential belonging and
essential diff erence (p. 5). Islam holds that this apparent “fi xity of location”,
seemingly confi rmed by factors such as the physiognomic diff erence between
traveler and travelee, is grounded in Kantian philosophy, which mobilizes a
circular and self-confi rming logic, reinforcing the Cartesian “duality of res
cognitans and res extensa” (p. 9). Following Said, then, Islam shares with
later scholars a sense that colonialism itself is founded on these perceived
cultural boundaries (p. 55). Travel writing is thus always already implicated
in the imperial project.
Despite the pessimism of Islam’s assessment, his study prefi gures the quest
of recent scholarship to understand how travel writers have attempted to,
in his words, “overcome” the genre’s unethical orientations (p. 9). Inspiring