Holland and Graham Huggan's Tourists with Typewriters (1998), as well as collections of theoretical and historical essays such as Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit (Clark, 1999) and The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Hulme and Youngs, 2002). Lisle, however, is the first critic to draw an explicit comparison between the differing impacts on world politics of 'the quasi-fictional genre of travel writing' and 'the policy documents, government press releases, parliamentary debates and media stories that are usually privileged in [an international] context ' (2006, 1). She is also particularly adept at explaining the inter-relation of politics and literature in the arena of travel writing, explaining that the act of writing about travel itself 'engenders contemporary power formations that are as unequal, unjust and exploitative as those forged during Empire ' (2006, 10). In underlining the perpetuation of these political influences, Lisle is developing Holland and Huggan's point that travel writing 'can be seen -though not exclusively -as an imperialist discourse through which dominant cultures (white, male, Euro-American, middle-class) seek to ingratiate themselves, often at others' expense' (Holland and Huggan, 1998, xiii).
This parenthesis -'(white, male, Euro-American, middle-class)' -is an interesting one, and while the racial awareness that undergirds my work offers ample opportunity for exploration of two of these terms ('whiteness' and 'Euro-Americanness'), issues of gender and class, to take the remaining two adjectives, are less well represented. The fact that all four authors in this study are male is certainly not unremarkable, not least because their gender gave them access to certain degrees of privilege at all-male institutions. Ondaatje was educated at the prestigious Dulwich College, London; Rushdie attended The Cathedral and John Cannon School, Mumbai, one of the oldest schools in India, and the exclusive Rugby School on his arrival in the UK; finally, both Seth and Ghosh were pupils at The Doon School, Dehradun. 9 In my study of their literary work, however, the issue of gender is one that I prefer to comment on in the context of particular examples in these authors' works of transnational literature, rather than making it a focal point of my investigations of the authors themselves. 10 For example, when Amitav Ghosh visits the house of a friend in In an Antique Land, and is challenged by a woman, an episode explored in some detail below (Chapter 3, Section II.ii), his dismissive treatment of the other says much about both his 'Travel writing' is either a hobby, or else it is a paid job, often referred to in its capacity as a branch of that most prosaic of literary occupations: journalism. Works classed as 'travel writing' are always already lesser than that which is created by an 'author': the output of the latter is seen as fundamentally more creative and imaginative than that of the 'travel writer'. 13 A further inference can be drawn from Lisle's opening gambit, and from her entire work: political positions are often always already implicated in the publication of a travelogue, whether in its aesthetic or ethical (re)presentation. Joan-Pau Rubiés also emphasises this in his introduction to ethnographic representations in the genre, describing a constant 'political dimension [to] the description of other peoples in travel writing ' (2002, 255). Moreover, these descriptions have historically often been mediated by those with political agendas of their own; Rubiés asserts, for example, that 'in some cases it is possible to separate the sober description of the sailor from the elaboration of the professional writer, as when [John] Hawkesworth undertook to "write up" the official account of [Captain] Cook's first voyage', landing on Tahiti in 1769 (2002, 249). 14 The significance of the travelogue, both in the politi cal arena and in the context of other cultural productions, undermines the 'minority' of the 'received status' outlined by Lisle in her introduction (2006, 1), not only in the literary realm, but within a global political understanding. Given the acknowledged political complexities of the travelogue's origins, it is surprising that Lisle relegates a large swathe of the genre to the status of a textual aside, using the aforementioned parenthesis: 'different kinds of people [are] now writing travelogues (including those who were previously colonised)'. Although Lisle does not entirely fail to address the travel writing of authors connected with the idea of being 'previously colonised', 15 she makes scant mention when focusing on such writers of the fact that they have all, effectively, emerged from her earlier parenthesis. In this book, I reassert the importance of this writing both in the study of the travel writing genre and in more general terms: to ignore this most interesting manifestation of travel writing is to license a certain degree of forgetfulness about the troubled racialising ideas buried within the concept, and located at the heart of any literature that addresses ideas of identity, belonging, and what it means to be 'at home'. I believe that transnational literature, which addresses these very topics, is tied up with the travel writing that precedes it in hitherto unacknowledged ways.
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