Decolonial Travel Writing, 5 op

Travel is fundamental to narrative – indeed, it could be argued that all stories are in some form linked to spatial movement and displacement; as Mikhail Bakhtin has powerfully argued, journeys in narrative texts spatialise the movements of narrative itself. At the same time, the emergence of prose narratives in English was closely tied to the beginnings of British colonialism. This course examines the genre of travel writing but focuses on texts that challenge the colonial underpinnings of the genre. Taking Ursula Pike’s An Indian among Los Indígenas: A Native Travel Memoir (2021) as a starting point, we will reflect on the decolonial possibilities of Indigenous and diasporic forms of travel writing, from The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789), whose author was transported from West Africa to the Caribbean as a slave before purchasing his freedom, to contemporary works. Throughout the course, we will work with the assumption that the redefinition of space and geography in these texts goes hand in hand with a questioning of established forms of travel writing, as well as of the very notion of ‘travel’ itself. Travel writing has long been associated with the visual regimes connected to colonial power and privilege (as discussed by Mary Louise Pratt in Imperial Eyes). On the one hand, we will therefore pay attention to a wider range of sensory and bodily experiences. On the other hand, we will test the hypothesis that decolonising travel writing also means finding new narrative and poetic forms – such as non-fiction poetry (David Groulx, From Turtle Island to Gaza, 2019), academic essays in the form of storytelling (David T. McNab, “Travels of a Métis through Spirit Memory, around Turtle Island, and Beyond”), or plural narration (Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee, 2017).