Other Routes: African and Asian Travel Writings From Before 1900

Research into travel writing has reflected a singularly one-sided gaze of the European subject's encounter with non-Western cultures. This account has largely been framed around the narratives of discovery associated with imperialism, including the obsessive interest in "exotic" cultures and the illumination of the "Self" that the contact with the "Other" permitted. Even when these studies have functioned as critiques of the self-reflective European subject, they have often maintained intact its sense of agency. The dynamic European traveller functions as an agent of history in these "white mythologies", delving into the heart of darkness and naming (and taming) all things strange. It is this image of travel that has dominated our understanding of the genre, a product of the European age of expansion and colonisation between the fifteenth and the twentieth centuries.