" Colonial politics, colonial poetics? Reading early modern travel writing, then and now "
This lecture reflects on some of the key conceptual and methodological challenges raised by the study of travel writing, a capacious body of material comprising diaries, journals, letters, logbooks, and reports. Its central argument is that while the entanglements of travel and colonialism are well known, insufficient attention has been paid to the role played by the rhetoric of travel writing in articulating and reinforcing colonial discourse, and thus the practice of colonialism itself. Focussing on early modern English travel writers including the proto-tourist Thomas Coryate, the diplomat and poetic theorist William Scott, the chaplain Edward Terry, and the merchant Peter Mundy, this lecture sets out a model for reading travel writing which attends equally to questions of politics and poetics. It places particular attention to the relationship between the language and ideas of the rhetorical tradition — which encouraged orators to speak for ‘profit’, to gain ‘credit’, and to ‘prove’ themselves to their listeners – and the economics of early modern travel and trade, which were preoccupied with profit, credit, and improvement, too. Moreover, it reflects on the implications of this research for meritocracy studies by considering the fraught relationship between ideas of meritocracy and the practice of travel, and what this means for our reading of early modern travel writing now, including in the context of editing.
More information on Prof. Din-Kariuki's visit in Brussels, including two workshops, can be found here.