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Writing the Journey: June 1999

" Narrating 'Other' Times and Spaces in a Postcolonial Age: Robert Kaplan and Pico Iyer Explore Some Lonely Places of the World"


Alison Harvey
Department of English
University of Nevada, Reno
Email: harveyb@fiu.edu

Much current work on travel writing addresses the ways in which travel writing participates in colonial or what Edward Said has described as "orientalist" discourse (Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books, 1979). But while important work in the area of postcolonial criticism has been undertaken to identify the orientalist discourse(s) operating in many nineteenth century travel texts, current critical approaches to travel writing have not as yet looked in much detail at more contemporary travel narratives. In my paper, I will discuss the ways in which contemporary travel narratives, written in what I call the postcolonial and postOrientalism present, interact with the times, places, and peoples they represent. Focusing my talk on recent travel writings by Robert Kaplan and Pico Iyer, I will discuss whether and/or how their current travel narratives achieve a less "othering" mode of narrating and representing "others" than their nineteenth-century counterparts.

Given that Kaplan and Iyer are not only writing in a postcolonial and postOrientalism moment but a "postmodern" one as well, their texts raise important questions about the ways in which current travel writing participates in and/or challenges colonialist, orientalist, and modernist discursive patterns and representational tropes. Among the questions that Kaplan's and Iyer's texts raise and which I will pursue in my presentation are: Have we, as writers and readers of travel narratives, learned anything from Said's Orientalism in terms of how we write and read about "other" times and places? Have we become more aware of the modes by which we in the West represent "others," or do we continue to mobilize as Kaplan says at one point in his narrative the same "old st ory" about other places and peoples? (Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth, New York: Vintage Departures, 1997, 62). And even: Is it possible to write an "unothering" travel text?

Approaching these questions by reading Kaplan's and Iyer's texts in conjunction with ideas drawn from narrative theory as well as from postcolonial criticism, I will discuss some of the ways in which Kaplan's and Iyer's texts engage with and often perpetuate orientalist discourse. I will also suggest that although their texts at times offer the beginnings of "unothering" representations, these beginnings are often undermined by the ways in which their narrative approaches serve to contain these potential alterities. And finally though I certainly have no answers to the representational dilemmas I discuss I will offer some tentative suggestions for alternative narrative possibilities.


Alison Harvey
Teaching fellow
Department of English
University of Nevada, Reno
Reno, NV 89557
7757841304 (o)
7753242126 (h)
aharvey@praha.reno.nv.us

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Updated May 23, 1999