Overview

In this collection leading scholars in the field examine the interfaces between narratives of travel and of empire. The term ‘American’ is used here in the hemispheric sense and ‘American travel writing’ includes both writing about America by visitors and writings by Americans abroad. The contributors are recognized specialists in different periods of American literature and travel writing. The essays explore the ways in which descriptions of the landscapes and peoples of colonized territories shaped perceptions of these areas; the transmission images and metaphors between colony and metropole; the othering of non-scribal cultures as ‘primitive’ or ‘wild’; the deployment of representations of encounters between European and other cultures in order to critique or reinforce European or American values and cultural practices; the tacit assumptions of cultural or economic hegemony underlying U.S. or European travel writing.

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9781846311802

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Reviews

In this volume, 11 scholars of transatlantic studies examine the connection between themes of empire and travel narratives covering a staggering time period: from the first English colonies to the end of the last millennium. The editors made a brave effort to unite these vastly different articles with two unifying thematic concepts: how travellers represent and create empire and how the 'Othering' of aliens abroad define identity at home. The first three essays deal with Europeans visiting North America. Donald Ross's 'What Are We Doing Here?' compares early English colony charters and English explorers' reports, arguing that English colonists had a passionate ideological mission to convert Native Americans and a hard-headed desire to turn a profit from the New World _ hardly a new answer to this old question. Susan Castillo's essay defends Louis de Hennepin's much doubted and controversial travel description claiming that historians missed the point by overreaching in their expectation of objective truth. She claims that literary scholars appreciate the sometimes contradictory character of Hennepin's travel narratives. Charles Forsdick focuses on French perceptions of Niagara Falls from Hennepin to Simone de Beauvoir. Forsdick convincingly demonstrates how travel writing is constantly reflecting contemporary concerns and changes. The remaining eight essays focus on Americans travelling abroad. Will Verhoeven's essay discusses the transatlantic biography of the infamous American revolutionary, trader, and lover, Gilbert Imlay. Verhoeven shows how Imlay's writings represented typical American virtues and the utopian ideas of a new society in which wealth, simplicity and fame are not contradictory. In the end, Verhoeven points out that Imlay betrayed his American ideals as well as his famous lover Mary Wollstonecraft. Gesa Mackenthun gives a refreshing description of proto-Indiana Jones archaeologist/adventurer John Lloyd Stephens, who planned to move substantial parts of ancient Mayan cities to New York. Mackenthun interprets Stephens's plans as a logical product of America's appropriation of the entire North American continent under the banner of Manifest Destiny. Shirley Foster describes the shock of American travellers upon discovering the slums and poverty of an industrialising European continent when they expected quaint little villages. This discovery reaffirmed Americans' belief in the superiority of their own country and left them distressed about the future of American society. Peter Hulme's 'Sunny Tropics: US Travel Writers in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba' is certainly the most timely essay in this collection. Today's public associates 'Gitmo' with torture and illegality, but Hulmes describes how the navy base and harbour quickly became a place of contradiction between the image of a tropical paradise and an alien occupation fortress. The essay ends with a useful review of recent books on the prison camp. Peter Rawlings's essay on imperialism in Henry James's writings reveals that Henry James was astutely aware of imperialism, claiming that expansion 'made the English what they are ... it has educated the English' (179). James thought, however, that America was ahead of Europe because it could freely 'pick and choose and assimilate other cultures' (180). Tim Young's essay explains why recent scholarship and the political left neglect the works of the wealthy communist world traveller Kate Crane- Gartz. Her writings are embarrassing to modern sensibilities because her patronising comments on foreigners reveal a shockingly closed mind that shrank from embracing the Other. David Seeds's 'American Ambassadors' illustrates how the Cold War politicised American travellers abroad such as Robert Heinlein and John Steinbeck. Most of these travellers were perplexed by anti-American feelings in the Third World and suspected what Richard Wright called 'the cunning hand of Moscow' (227). Judy Newman's sympathetic account of Emily Prager's personal story of a transnational, transracial adoption in China is embedded in the argument about whether these adoptions are Western rescues of Third World babies or Western exploitation of poor Chinese. Covering five hundred years and such diverse topics as described above can hardly be more than glimpses into the complex relationship between empire and travel narratives. It seems that the two editors were faced with 11 essays and the impossible task of clearly unifying them thematically. While the essays are interesting and noteworthy, as a collection they are uneven and often stretch the thematic boundaries. Journal of Transatlantic Studies 20100820

In this volume, 11 scholars of transatlantic studies examine the connection between themes of empire and travel narratives covering a staggering time period: from the first English colonies to the end of the last millennium. The editors made a brave effort to unite these vastly different articles with two unifying thematic concepts: how travellers represent and create empire and how the 'Othering' of aliens abroad define identity at home. The first three essays deal with Europeans visiting North America. Donald Ross's 'What Are We Doing Here?' compares early English colony charters and English explorers' reports, arguing that English colonists had a passionate ideological mission to convert Native Americans and a hard-headed desire to turn a profit from the New World _ hardly a new answer to this old question. Susan Castillo's essay defends Louis de Hennepin's much doubted and controversial travel description claiming that historians missed the point by overreaching in their expectation of objective truth. She claims that literary scholars appreciate the sometimes contradictory character of Hennepin's travel narratives. Charles Forsdick focuses on French perceptions of Niagara Falls from Hennepin to Simone de Beauvoir. Forsdick convincingly demonstrates how travel writing is constantly reflecting contemporary concerns and changes. The remaining eight essays focus on Americans travelling abroad. Will Verhoeven's essay discusses the transatlantic biography of the infamous American revolutionary, trader, and lover, Gilbert Imlay. Verhoeven shows how Imlay's writings represented typical American virtues and the utopian ideas of a new society in which wealth, simplicity and fame are not contradictory. In the end, Verhoeven points out that Imlay betrayed his American ideals as well as his famous lover Mary Wollstonecraft. Gesa Mackenthun gives a refreshing description of proto-Indiana Jones archaeologist/adventurer John Lloyd Stephens, who planned to move substantial parts of ancient Mayan cities to New York. Mackenthun interprets Stephens's plans as a logical product of America's appropriation of the entire North American continent under the banner of Manifest Destiny. Shirley Foster describes the shock of American travellers upon discovering the slums and poverty of an industrialising European continent when they expected quaint little villages. This discovery reaffirmed Americans' belief in the superiority of their own country and left them distressed about the future of American society. Peter Hulme's 'Sunny Tropics: US Travel Writers in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba' is certainly the most timely essay in this collection. Today's public associates 'Gitmo' with torture and illegality, but Hulmes describes how the navy base and harbour quickly became a place of contradiction between the image of a tropical paradise and an alien occupation fortress. The essay ends with a useful review of recent books on the prison camp. Peter Rawlings's essay on imperialism in Henry James's writings reveals that Henry James was astutely aware of imperialism, claiming that expansion 'made the English what they are ... it has educated the English' (179). James thought, however, that America was ahead of Europe because it could freely 'pick and choose and assimilate other cultures' (180). Tim Young's essay explains why recent scholarship and the political left neglect the works of the wealthy communist world traveller Kate Crane-Gartz. Her writings are embarrassing to modern sensibilities because her patronising comments on foreigners reveal a shockingly closed mind that shrank from embracing the Other. David Seeds's 'American Ambassadors' illustrates how the Cold War politicised American travellers abroad such as Robert Heinlein and John Steinbeck. Most of these travellers were perplexed by anti-American feelings in the Third World and suspected what Richard Wright called 'the cunning hand of Moscow' (227). Judy Newman's sympathetic account of Emily Prager's personal story of a transnational, transracial adoption in China is embedded in the argument about whether these adoptions are Western rescues of Third World babies or Western exploitation of poor Chinese. Covering five hundred years and such diverse topics as described above can hardly be more than glimpses into the complex relationship between empire and travel narratives. It seems that the two editors were faced with 11 essays and the impossible task of clearly unifying them thematically. While the essays are interesting and noteworthy, as a collection they are uneven and often stretch the thematic boundaries. Journal of Transatlantic Studies 20100820 In American Travel and Empire (2009), editors Susan Castillo and David Seed collect essays that explore how travel writing has informed cultural preconceptions of hemispheric America. Donald Ross, in What Are We Doing Here? Scenarios for Early English Colonies in North America, assesses the translation of sixteenthcentury conservative Englishness in Colonial charters, where a mundane commercial imaginary envisaged the American continent as its utopia made manifest. Susan Castillo, in 'The Lies of a Distant Traveller'? The Travel Writing of Louis de Hennepin, explores the art - and artifice - of Hennepin's Description of Louisiana, which has been excoriated as a 'geographical' lie. Castillo's examination offers an alternative perspective, where the sculpting of recording and fictive devices can be seen to embody the conflicts of travel writing in the context of empire. In French Representations of Niagara: From Hennepin to Butor, Charles Forsdick also explores travel liar Hennepin as one of several writers fascinated by Niagara, assessing the impact of colonial travel on the tradition of French literature, specifically the metaphoric force of the falls themselves. Wil Verhoeven's 'Come to these Arcadian Regions where there is room for Millions': Citizen Imlay and the Empire of the West examines the parallels that appear in the travel writing of British J acobin radicals of the late eighteenth century, seeking a world of liberty and equality on the grand frontier, and the land speculators, seeking profit and personal fame, with the figure of the American Gilbert Imlay, writer of A Topographical Description if the Western Territory if North America (1793) and the frontier romance The Emigrant (1793), merchant and traveller across London, Paris and the American territories, at the pivot of the discursive territories of reformers and profiteers. In The Conquest of Antiquity: The Travelling Empire of John Lloyd Stephens, Gesa Mackenthun explores the development of Central America as a discursive site of American identity politics following the demise of the Spanish Empire, arguing that the aims of the archaeologist-adventurer (a forerunner for Indiana Jones) to collect Mayan cities for museum display in the US, as expressed in his 1840S travel narratives, matched manifest destiny's urge to appropriate and own the entirety of the American continent. Shirley Foster's 'A Confusion of Unwashed and Shabbily Dressed People': Nineteenth-Century Americans and Urban Britain revisits Hawthorne's Our Old Home (r 863) in a study of the impact of England's cities on the writings of a series of transadantic travellers whose record of urban spaces and peoples destabilised the geographic imaginary of New and Old Worlds set up by Washington Irving et al. in the early part of the nineteenth century. In Sunny Tropic Scenes: US Travel Writers and Guancinamo Bay, Cuba, Peter Hulme examines travel writing about Cuba through three key historical moments: the Spanish-American War of r 898, which announced, overdy, America's colonial intentions, the period of relative stability prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the early years of the twenty-first century. In Henry James and the 'Swelling Act of the Imperial Theme,' Peter Rawlings examines the work of arguably the most prolific writer of travel and empire associated with England and America, in an account of James's troubled responses to late nineteenth-century British colonial endeavours in Afghanistan and Africa, as well as his wider understanding of the polyphonic ideologies of imperialism. Tim Youngs's The Pacifist Traveller: Kate Crane-Gartz argues that the travel writing of this largely forgotten agitator expresses profound anxieties about imperialist ideologies during the Second World War but struggles to resist racial stereotyping in accounts of Native Americans and Chinese immigrants in California. David Seed's essay, American Ambassadors: Travellers in the Cold War, explores the uneasy consciousness of surveillance and a struggle for expression within a framework of geopolitical tensions in the travel accounts of Philip Wylie, Robert Heinlein, John Steinbeck and Richard Wright. J udie N ewman's In The Missionary Position: Ernily Prager in China examines the writings of the American feminist on Chinese culture, which accede to Western stereotypes on practices such as footbinding, but also explore the complex and tricky arena of transnational adoption within the framework of American-Chinese relations. This expansive and diverse collection demonstrates that the concept of empire was, as it continues to be, a formative and framing presence in American travel writing. Journal of American Studies, 44 2010 This expansive and diverse collection demonstrates that the concept of empire was, as it continues to be, a formative and framing presence in American travel writing. Journal of American Studies, 44 2010 This rich collection of essays suggests ways in which the multiple discourses of travel have always been integral to conceptions of American political power and cultural identity. -- Paul Giles University of Oxford American Travel and Empire, edited by Susan Castillo and David Seed, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2009, 288 pp., GBP65. ISBN: 9781846311802. Writing, Travel and Empire: In the Margins of Anthropology, edited by Peter Hulme and Russell McDougall, London and New York, I. B. Taurus and Co. Ltd, 2007, 248 pp., GBP59.50, ISBN: 9781845113049. Two recent edited collections, American Travel and Empire, edited by Susan Castillo and David Seed, and Writing, Travel and Empire: In The Margins of Anthropology, edited by Peter Hulme and Russell McDougall, suggest important new directions for the study of travel writing and empire. Taking a transnational view of American travel writing, Susan Castillo and David Seed's American Travel and Empire examines the ways in which travel narratives written by visitors and colonists in the Americas as well as those written by Americans abroad influence perceptions of the Americas and engage with imperialist ideology. The essays are wide-ranging in terms of period, topic, and approach. Essays by Donald Ross. Wil Verhoeven and Peter Hulme historicise travel writing and imperial conquest. Ross examines the rhetorical strategies of North American colonial charters and the travel accounts produced in the context of such charters to show how these texts coincided with the economic imperatives of colonisation and provided a discursive ground for the organisation of empire. Verhoeven explores the impact of the American Revolution and the loss of the colonies in transatlantic emigration discourse in the late eighteenth century, particularly Gilbert Imlay's A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America (1792), while Hulme provides an overview of US travel writing about Guantanamo Bay at three crucial moments: the 1898 US occupation, the period just before the 1990 collapse of the Soviet Union, and the present-day detainment of enemy combatants at the US naval base. By examining accounts of US personnel employed at Guantanamo Bay, Hulme interrogates the boundaries of travel writing as a genre. Susan Castillo also explores some of the generic contours of travel writing, specifically the tension between the subjective and the scientific, in her study of Louis de Hennepin's Description de la Louisiane (1683). Castillo notes how Hennepin balances objectivity and factual accuracy with narrative coherence, an embodiment. Castillo argues, of the 'conflicting rhetoric of travel writing and Empire' (53). Charles Forsdick similarly examines what he terms the 'generic indeterminacy of the travelogue' (58) in his fascinating study (which includes Hennepin among other writers from the seventeenth to late twentieth century) of the textualisation of Niagara Falls in French travel narratives. The contradictions and dualities of travel writing are further explored in other essays, Judie Newman discusses how Western agendas innuence the depiction of Chinese cultural development in Emily Prager's recent travelogues, and David Seed examines the conflict between the personal and the political in the travels of Cold War writers such as Philip Wylie, Richard Wright and John Steinbeck. Tim Youngs also emphasises the sometimes overlooked political dimensions of travel writing, reminding us that travel accounts should not be studied 'in isolation from the actions that propel them' (212) as he examines the politics of dissent in Kate Crane-Gartz's late 1920s Travel Diary. Both Shirley Foster and Peter Rawlings analyse travel writing that exploits the dichotomy of the Old and New World as it engages with the notion of empire, Foster explores the merging of personal and national anxieties in the writing of nineteenth-century American travellers encountering the urban poor in Britain, and Rawlings outlines Henry James's conflicted attitudes toward the British Empire before discussing the relationship between imperialism and aesthetics in his English and Italian travel writing and The American Scene (1907). Gesturing toward the growing interest in shifting the axis of critical inquiry away from east-west trajectories. Gesa Mackenthun helpfully outlines the north-south dimensions of American empire as revealed through John L1oyd Stephens's efforts to transplant Mesoamerican antiquities to US museums. These essays remind us of the cultural and aesthetic complexity of travel writing and recommend fruitful new paths for our study of travel and empire, such as the benefits of adopting a transnational perspective on American travel or the need to attend to the political dimensions of travel texts. Hulme and McDougaIrs Wriring. Travel and Empire illuminates the interconnections between ethnography, travel writing and empire. Hulme and McDougall note in their introduction that 'the margins of a discipline can offer particular insight into both its history and its future' (I). The volume positions itself in the margins of anthropology in several ways. There are no anthropologists contributing to the volume (save the author of the afterword) and each of the essays explores the interdisciplinary 'entanglements out of which the discipline emerged' (4). The contributors examine the life histories and texts of eight writers working under the auspices of the British Empire during the period from 1850 to 1940, thus situating 'biography at the intersection of cultural history, anthropology. and literary studies' (6). Many of the writers discussed reveal. as we might expect. the inherent conflicts of imperialist ideology. Leigh Dale's essay on George Grey's ethnographic work in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa highlights the 'paradox of Grey's passionate academic interest in indigenous cultures und his unbridled contempt for indigenous peoples' (37). In his interesting study of Henry Ling Roth's documenting of the supposed extinction of aboriginal Tasmanians, Russell McDougall shows how Ling Roth's work influenced Edwardian British representations of Tasmanian history and culture and notes its importa11l role in the contemporary Australian 'history wars' (44). Other contributors, such as Ralph Crane and Anna Johnston, emphasise a slightly different kind of conflict in Flora Annie Steel's work to improve native women's lives but only 'within a strict code of racial superiority' (73). The model of the bourgeois family W;IS also marshalled in support of racial hierarchies, as Julia Emberley argues in her study of Gertrude Lowthian Bell's infantilised and racialised representation of Turkish Arabia. Some essays are less cultural and literary analysis than biographical sketch, such as Robert Hampson's essay on Hugh Clifford in Malaya or Rosamund Dalziell's essay on Everard im Thurn in British Guiana and the Western Pacific. Two of the essays examine parallels between the ethnographic approaches these writers used to study culture both at home and abroad. Helen Carr argues that Roger Casement's Irish nationalism and homegrown anthropological studies in his homeland influenced his approach to Amazonian Indians, and Rod Edmond reveals how the ethnographic methods Tom Harrisson used in his study of indigenous populations in the New Hebrides informed his study of English populations as he launched Mass-Observation, the British social survey organisation. Writing, Travel and Empire unique critical approach from the margins of anthropology provides important insights about the relationship between travel writing and empire. even as, Peter Pels notes in the afterword, it negotiates the risks involved in situating the imperialist genre of biography at the centre of such a study. Both of these volumes suggest new critical approaches that will expand our study of travel writing in general and the relationship between travel writing and empire in particular. Studies in Travel Writing, Vol. 15, No. 2 201106

Author Information

David Seed is Professor of English at the University of Liverpool. He is the editor of (with Susan Castillo) American Travel and Empire (LUP, 2009) and author of Cinematic Fictions (LUP, 2009).

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