Medieval Travel Writing and the Question of Race

It is tempting to read premodern European travel writing as a body of work that speaks directly to and hence increases our knowledge of the so-called "monstrous races" or cultural "others" of Western Europe in the late Middle Ages. After all, not only do the texts themselves frequently voice their own explicitly descriptive designs, but twentieth-century scholarship has also contributed a great deal to our understanding of their habitations and positionings within the premodern world. ¹ In a number of cases, for example, we have come to know much about matters of authorship, social provenance, and circumstances of composition. A number of the surviving manuscripts, moreover, are either glossed, illuminated, or both, thereby providing evidence of contemporary readership and critical reception, as well as a sense of the value these texts may have had for their earliest audiences. ² And yet, despite the obvious usefulness of this kind of historicist scholarship, it still leaves open the considerable interpretive work needing to be done in order to assess what sorts of functions these travel texts may have had within their original historical settings. The guiding assumption in this essay is that premodern travel narratives deserve to be read not simply as windows onto the world, but rather as documents of critical historical understanding in their own right, as documents, that is to say, which comment critically on the historical conditions out of which they emerged. My intention in what follows is to focus more specifically on processes of critical historical understanding at work in several premodern travel texts, and in so doing, to shed new light on the ruses of both premodern and postmodern racial imagination.

Before looking more carefully at the premodern texts themselves, I would like first to address several questions that specifically pertain to the issue of ethnographic textual interpretation. When a piece of writing explicitly announces itself as an ethnographic account, must we as readers simply take that text at its word and recognize it as a reliable description of cultural others, or should we instead contemplate the ways in which ethnographies tend to produce the very "others" that they also purport to describe? Must we view ethnographic writing, in other words, as itself a kind of othering practice? And if so, to what extent does the complicated, uncertain end of ethnographic writing, namely, the production of an ethnographic "object" of study, suggest an equally complicated and uncertain situation of beginning, namely, the textual inscription of ethnographic subjectivity? As James Clifford has observed, ethnographic work is necessarily enmeshed in a world of enduring and also changing power inequalities, and it is for this reason that the function of ethnographic writing must be understood as "complex, often ambivalent, [and] potentially counter-hegemonic." ³ Setting forth the cultural text as a speaking subject in its own right, as that which "sees as well as is seen, [that which] evades, argues, [and] probes back," Clifford presents ethnography as a kind of power-laden dance in which observer and observed routinely become confused, and "culture" itself no longer becomes the province of any one figure of control. "Cultures do not hold still to have their pictures taken," Clifford reminds us: errors and errancies are the province of any and all projects of cultural description. Clifford's discussion of ethnographic writing thus urges us to recognize it not as a snapshot account of "others" who stand frozen in time, but rather as a dialogical, in-between space where "many voices clamor for expression," and especially as "an inscription of communicative processes that exist, historically, between subjects in relations of power." ⁴

Interestingly enough, premodern travel texts provide striking illustrations of a number of these insights. Consider, for example, John of Plano Carpini's thirteenth-century travel account History of the Mongols, in which Plano Carpini describes the inquisitory journey that he...