| Review of: |
The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing by Debbie Lisle
Cambridge University Press, 2006
Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge by Roxanne L. Euben
Princeton University Press, 2006
|
| Reviewed By: |
Shannon Wheatley |
| Reviewed in: |
The Journal of Politics |
| Date accepted online: |
14/01/2008 |
| Published in print: |
Volume 69, Issue 04, Pages 1210-1230 |
Book Reviews
If one begins, as these authors do, with the premise that writing is an activity with very real sociopolitical consequences, then in analyzing various travelogues one cannot be content with interrogating them for their truth value alone. It is not enough to ask whether travel writers approximate the truth; they could even be liars telling tales. For these two authors there are more important issues: what do these ideas do, what social effects do they have?
Both Debbie Lisle and Roxanne L. Euben interrogate various examples of travel writing, but they do so in very different ways and for very different purposes. For example, Lisle offers an engaging and accessible text that carefully negotiates the intersections between critical International Relations theory, literary studies, feminism, and geography to politicize contemporary travel writing and expose what this genre can reveal about world affairs and contemporary global life. Euben, on the other hand, offers an impressive command of her own discipline, political theory, while also engaging the disciplines of history and literature. She not only offers an analysis of how travelers of all kinds produce knowledge about others and themselves, but Euben also situates her research as part of a wider effort to understand political theory as an inherently comparative enterprise.
Lisle begins The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing by wondering why travel writing is still so popular. As illustrated by postcolonial scholarship, travel writing has been complicit in the maintenance of Empire. One would assume that travel writing would decline as the decolonization movements of the twentieth century dismantled the visible features of Empire. However, this has not been the case. Lisle explains the continual resuscitation of contemporary travel writing through two simultaneous and interrelated strategies: the colonial vision and the cosmopolitan vision. The former strategy reproduces the logic of Empire. Travel writers emerge from a dominant Western civilization to document other states, cultures, and people. Through categorizing, critiquing, and passing judgment on "other" areas of the world, the travel writer is able to maintain his or her privileged position. Understandably, many travel writers attempt to distance themselves from the colonial vision by advocating the emancipatory possibilities of travelogues. As described by Lisle, these authors celebrate the interdependence and common aims of all cultures. Unlike the colonial strategy, this cosmopolitan approach frames encounters with others in a more positive way-"they reveal moments of empathy, recognitions of difference, realisations of equality and insights into shared values" (4). Interestingly, it is this cosmopolitan vision that is most troubling for Lisle.
For Lisle the cosmopolitan vision is not as emancipatory as it claims to be. Moreover, it cannot itself be separated from the logic of colonialism, Orientalism, or Empire. In other words, these visions may appear to be dualistic, the cosmopolitan vision may even appear to be progressive, but the two visions actually exist in complex relationships with each other. At the heart of this relationship is the production of difference: "it requires the author to discriminate between what is familiar and what is exotic so that readers are satisfied that they are encountering people and places that are sufficiently foreign" (p. 71). For example, Lisle surveys a number of popular travelogues written in English since 1975. She most frequently juxtaposes the colonial approach of Paul Theroux and the cosmopolitan approaches of Bill Bryson and Michael Palin. Whether the "other" is depicted as a source of danger or as a source of comedic celebration, both approaches still rely upon the same logic of differentiation and the uncritical acceptance of geopolitical borders. Moreover, cosmopolitan writers are most alarming for "they smuggle in equally judgemental accounts of otherness under the guise of equality, tolerance and respect for difference" (p. 10). Thus, while the cosmopolitan vision may seem at times harmless and almost always "better" than explicit neocolonial strategies, this book suggests that the shift from a colonial to a cosmopolitan vision is far from benign.
The structure of The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing is straightforward. Lisle offers a detailed examination of the discourses that shape contemporary travel writing: the discourse of the literary genre (chap. 2), the discourse of liberal subjectivity (chap. 3), the discourse of modern cartography (chap. 4), and the discourse of nostalgia (chap. 5). Within each chapter Lisle's stated aim is to offer a "double-narrative" (p. 23). That is, the first direction of her analysis is to examine how each discourse (knowledge, subject, space, and time) achieves hegemonic status while the second, and more complex, direction of her analysis is to illustrate how each hegemonic discourse is always incomplete and opens up to moments of resistance. Lisle is quite successful on the first count. She offers a thought-provoking and refreshingly clear articulation of the major discourses that constitute contemporary travel writing and their dependence on identity/difference logic. However, one may be disappointed with her discussion of resistance. Perhaps it has come to be expected that any post-Said critique of travel writing should engage resistance and the act of "writing back." However, what Lisle offers is not so much a discussion on resistance as it is an acknowledgment for the potentiality of resistance that rarely materializes in the texts that she reviews.
For example, in Chapter 3, Lisle examines the subject position of the travel writer as a contested site that is unable to resolve the logic and legacy of Empire despite his or her insistence on a cosmopolitan ethos of inclusion and the general democratization of the genre. That is, as more women, non-Westerners, gays and lesbians, people with disabilities-all those who have been previously excluded as authors and subjects of travel writing-begin to write and to be written about, the internal logic of the genre should change. However, what Lisle finds is that this is not the case. Instead, the colonial vision continues to be reproduced even in texts that appear to be advancing the cosmopolitan vision. Lisle uses Tete-Michael Kpomassie's An African in Greenland as an example in which a "colonized" subject from Togo inhabits the subject position of travel writer, connects with the indigenous Eskimo of Greenland, and feels solidarity with them because of shared colonial heritage (p. 88). However, more significant for Lisle is when Kpomassie "escapes his usual confines as a colonized subject" and starts to mimic behavior that was previously associated with the colonial power, i.e., "sleeping with local women, moralizing about locals, capitalizing on his 'natural aristocracy' by 'playing the king a little' " (p. 89). Thus, even when the travel writer occupies both sides of the identity/difference logic, he still projects his own category of difference.
While this may be an example of failed resistance to the hegemonic discourse of liberal subjectivity, the reader should not really be surprised. The restrictions on Lisle's research, popular contemporary travelogues written in English, would indeed limit the sort of hegemonic interruptions or moments of resistance that she seeks to expose.
Alternatively, in Journeys to the Other Shore, Roxanne L. Euben examines both Western and non-Western travel writings. In this way she offers a direct response to the growing body of literature on Western travels to "other" or, specifically, non-Western places. That is, Euben acknowledges that many scholars examine how Western travel writing produces the "colonized other," but by doing so, these scholars inadvertently reproduce the West as the epicenter of the world. Accordingly, Euben begins her research by wondering what it would be like to invert these common research questions. Instead of only investigating how Western travel writing produces the "colonized other," Euben asks: How have travel and exploration by Muslims produced and transformed their own sense of self and other? How do journeys by Muslims within and beyond the Dar al-Islam (Abode of Islam), as well as travels by Westerners, serve to articulate and transfigure the parameters of home and a scale of the strange and estranging? (2). Addressing these questions, Euben moves with ease between academic disciplines, historical periods, and multiple languages.
Euben investigates the connections among travel, theory, and knowledge both in several representative texts of the rihla genre (a genre of Arabic literature that recounts travels) and in texts regarded as central to Western political thought in which the association among travel, theory, and political wisdom is particularly salient (p. 14). In Chapter 3, for example, Euben juxtaposes Herodotus's Histories and the rihla of the famous fourteenth-century Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta. Taken together, these two travelers and their texts serve as a model for the analyses that follow in Euben's text, as they represent the three arguments central to her book: (1) that the association of travel and the pursuit of knowledge is not confined to any particular cultural constellation or epoch; (2) that knowledge about what is (un)familiar is produced comparatively by way of "nested polarities"; and (3) that the course and consequences of exposures to the unfamiliar are unpredictable (p. 15-16).
Euben continues her analyses in the following chapter by comparing the travels of Alexis de Tocqueville and Rifa a Rafi al-Tahtawi to unfamiliar lands in search of practical wisdom to bring home. Despite important differences, these texts also illustrate important interplay between travel and domination. In Chapter 5, Euben extends the analysis even further by analyzing questions of gender and genre through Montesquieu's Persian Letters and the writings of nineteenth-century Arabian Princess Sayyida Salme bint Said ibn Sultan.
As this book illustrates, juxtapositions of Muslim and European travels point to many historical and cultural differences in the pursuit of knowledge through travel. However, Euben also reveals an important commonality: knowledge is constituted through nested polarities (us/them, self/other, male/ female). Accordingly, the reader may not be surprised when Euben concludes with more optimism than Lisle about the cosmopolitical possibilities exposed in travel writing. Of course, Euben is cautious not to claim that travel guarantees critical reflection into one's own nomoi, but travel is conducive to the expansion of solidarity and attachment. This she illustrates quite well in her description of Muslim cosmopolitanism.
As already indicated, both The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing and Journeys to the Other Shore are truly interdisciplinary texts. The former would be of interest to anyone struggling with the on-going discursive productions of difference and how these insights are indeed serious components of global politics. In addition, this book may simply serve as a self-reflective guide for anyone who has ever traveled or has ambitions to do so; it is accessible and may appeal beyond an academic community. Journeys to the Other Shore, on the other hand, offers a detailed and theoretically driven analysis of movement in the search for knowledge. This text is particularly timely as Euben challenges stereotypes about Muslim mobility and the alleged monopoly Western scholars have held on political theorizing. For too long rihlas have been guarded by area specialists and Euben encourages theorists to seriously engage these texts.
