Mapping Ultima Thule. Agata Lubowicka

links between textuality and imperialism in relation to travel writing are also highlighted by critics of English literature Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan, who denounce travel literature as an imperialist discourse endorsed by dominant cultures (white, male, Euro-American, middle-class), which as a rule happens at the expense of others.¹¹⁰ British travel literature researcher Dennis Porter observes that even the most patently apolitical travel account bears certain features of political intervention.¹¹¹

The Swedish critic of travel literature Arne Melberg observes that what writers of travel accounts do is “mapping,” which he understands as practices of cultural geography aimed at producing comprehensive, explanatory narratives about the world and people who inhabit it.¹¹² Melberg ←47 | 48→argues that in its broader sense “mapping” corresponds to what travel writing scholar Mary Louise Pratt calls “imperial gaze”, i.e. a mode of subjecting a “foreign” reality through distinctively Western frameworks of perception and description which travellers used to make this reality understandable to their readers back home.¹¹³ Western travel writings can thus be understood as enactments of “imaginative geographies,” where representations of people and places not only express the cultural and ideological entanglements of their authors, but are also involved in the conquest of the non-Western world.

1 Colonial Discourse and Representation Analysis

Nicholas Harrison in his comprehensive Postcolonial Criticism (2003) describes the postcolonial field as “eclectic,” explaining that postcolonial theory cannot be defined in the same (reductive) way as, for example, deconstruction, Marxism, psychoanalysis and feminism, i.e. the theories on which postcolonialism tends to draw.¹¹⁴ Moreover, as there are several different critical postcolonial theories, rather than a single one, no critic can aspire to represent or speak on behalf of the entire postcolonial field.¹¹⁵ This multiplicity of varied postcolonial projects implies that there is not one, shared research object and, furthermore, that there is not one, universally upheld theoretical and critical methodology. Colonial discourse analysis, whose concepts and tools I employ in this book, is thus just one among other methods which are used within this critical framework.

It has moved to the forefront of postcolonial studies “by establishing the historical context in which a colonial position or condition can make sense” and by emphatically recognising the “pre-eminence of location.”¹¹⁶ With its theoretical context transcending regional boundaries, colonial discourse analysis focuses on issues which are prompted by these very boundaries and, at the same time, articulate specific local problems.

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Because colonial discourse claims to be objective, constructing itself as axiomatic and universal, analysis of this discourse aims to expose it cultural embeddedness and the biases that inform its practices. In this context, Diana Brydon and Helen Tiffin talk of the dismantling of colonial authority which has been supported by multifarious systems of imperial control, for example by the written word.¹¹⁷ A first step to exposing the mechanisms of confining the colonial object within European textuality is to analyse colonial tropes, forms, themes and the ways they function – with one set of cognitive codes being privileged over others – as a mode of cultural control.¹¹⁸

In his Orientalism (1978), the founding text of colonial discourse analysis, Said argues that although a populated space which Europe refers to as the “Orient” has indeed existed and still does, it was actually fashioned as an imaginary conceptual entity by the European “style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident.’ ”¹¹⁹ Said calls this “style of thought” “Orientalism” and examines in detail the discursive practices that reduced the Orient to a well-established repertoire of characteristics forged from superficial and simplified information in order, basically, “to raise Europe or a European race to dominion over non-European portions of mankind.”¹²⁰ Helping Westeners deal with the foreign, non-Western world by constructing it as the ultimate Other in literature and culture, Orientalism, in fact, helped them to exert control over it and maintain their hegemonic power.

Said called for analysing discourse itself, focusing on its “internal consistency” and “its ideas about the Orient,” while largely disregarding the reality outside it.¹²¹ Postcolonial critics were supposed to dissect the imperial strategy of textual control of conquered lands and people exerted in particular time and place. This approach involved viewing the colonial situation as produced by colonial discourse and contributing to the production of it. In such explorations, the concept of “representation” serves thus as the major analytical tool.

Addressing “representation” as the “production of the meanings of the concepts in our minds through language,”¹²² Jamaican-born British cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932–2014) ←49 | 50→developed a tripartite concept of human world-perception which involves really existing things; concepts we use; and signs referring to our assemblage of mental concepts. Hall labels what enables us to correlate the three components as “systems of representation,” which are responsible for the process of meaning production and consist of various ways of organizing and classifying concepts and establishing relations between them, as well as communicating these concepts through a given system of signs. Representation is thus a practice which involves material elements, such as writing or literature, which represent concepts that can function as signs and carry or bestow meanings.¹²³

The meanings of things thus do not reside in themselves, but they are rather constructed though representing (signifying) practices, which confer meaning on things.¹²⁴ This meaning is never ultimately given but depends on the cultural and historical context, on a specific time and place. Similarly, literature as a system of representation cannot be attributed any conclusive, final meaning and, given its constructionist nature, takes part in “shaping social subjects and historical events”¹²⁵.

Said argues that literary representations of the Orient have served colonialism as vital tools for exerting domination and maintaining power over the non-European Other by using effective “vocabulary, imagery, rhetoric, and figures.”¹²⁶ This means that every study of the Orient is linked to other studies of it.¹²⁷ British geographers Trevor Barnes and James Duncan define this phenomenon as intertextuality, that is, a process in which meaning is produced from text to text rather than between a text and the world: new worlds come into being based on old texts only to become old worlds serving to produce new texts.¹²⁸ This ←50 | 51→development is discussed in relation to travel literature by Peter Stadius, who studies constructions