Volume I Issue II April 2021

Name of Author : Ishtiaq Ahmad & Shahnawaz Ahmad

Title of the paper : Postcolonial Aspects in travel Narratives

Abstract: Travel writing has been, is, and probably will remain, demonized by postcolonial critics. This ‘genre’ has very quickly been linked to what Edward Said named Colonial Discourse, mainly for what many believe to be an intertwined relationship with colonialism. Travel writing’s main ‘contribution’ is to have diffused sermons of difference and by difference inferiority, which was then used a rhetorical apology by the west to conquer and colonize. David Spurr in his book The Rhetoric of Empire 2003 argues in the same direction. He suggests that travel writings constituted “a source of information” to future-colonial administrators about the situations in their future colonies that by describing and gazing upon they already started having a sense of ownership vis-à-vis these spaces. Douglas Ivison starts his article entitled “Travel Writing at the End of Empire…” by arguing in the same direction, he says that “the practice of travel writing, and that of reading travel books, was inextricably intertwined with the creation and maintenance of European imperialism.

Keywords : Colonial Discourse, Displacement, Postcolonialism, Travel writing

DOI :

Page No. : 57-59