In Transit: Travel, Text, Empire (review)

The early nineteenth century is often cited as the historical period that heralded the era of mass modern travel withinEurope. Under the command of Napoleon, Europe's roads improved, affording safe passage for the traveling bourgeoisie, Baedeker books in hand. This narrative is recognizable enough, yet it is its discursive coherence and familiarity that the essays collected in In Transit: Travel, Text, Empire confront.

The twelve essays in this volume focus largely, but not exclusively, on the period of Britain's second empire, and they exhibit obvious indebtedness to the works of Mary Louise Pratt and Judith Adler. ¹ Taking as their shared premise the idea that travel and travel writing function in complex ways as technologies of the twinned economies of colonialism and modernity, and following Ann Laura Stoler's persuasive assertion that colonies are not simply or only sites of exploration and exploitation, but are also "laboratories of modernity," the chapters survey a broad range of colonial sites—"Scotland, India, Borneo, the Caribbean, South Africa, Australia, the South Pacific, and Papua and New Guinea," among others (4). ² They concur with the conclusions drawn by much recent work on the relations between imperialism and travel writing: travels to, and narratives about, "other" places and their inhabitants are marked by western privilege. Moreover, they assert that such technologies contribute to the provisional construction and consolidation of that privilege. However, what is also recognized in this collection is that this privilege is both internally fissured by mutually constitutive categories of gender and class (little attention is given in this text to race and whiteness studies), and supported by new modes and means of travel that industrial capitalism facilitated, and which engendered new sensory experiences and apparatuses that could be called on in the service of colonial governances.

Indeed, one of the strengths of this volume is that it stresses the multiple purposes and effects that travel to, through and from "the colonies" might entail not only for individual imperial agents, but also for the ideological projects of British colonialism and modernity. By its own admission, though, the volume does not concern itself in any detail with responses to the "visits" by those people who were witnessed, scrutinized and written about.

In her chapter on Lady Maria Nugent's travelogue of Jamaica during the early nineteenth century, for example, Claudia Bardenstein points out that Nugent's travel accounts, which record and recount her role as governor's wife, necessitate specific class and gender performances that are informed by and affirm those functions at home. Nevertheless, her "tour of duty" (46), which is both underpinned by an idea of Christian self-sacrifice, and which overlaps with a faith in the need and benefits of the civilizing mission, animates her agency in the name of imperial administration and surveillance. Anna Johnston's essay on missionary travel narratives similarly examines the ways in which early nineteenth century evangelical travel in Polynesia, and accounts of encounters with others who come to be understood as such in the course of those contacts, "profoundly influenced British knowledge about the colonies and promulgated narratives and images crucial to the British understanding of empire" (66).

Revising this trajectory of knowledge production, circulation and consumption, Hsu-Ming Teo argues that current understandings of the social and ideological work that travel writings enact would substantially profit by taking seriously the ways in which changes in "the metropolis," brought about by modernity, inflected the representations and knowledge these cultural productions promoted. In an interesting analysis of women's travel writings from 1880 to 1939, Teo forwards the hypothesis that changing values and behaviors attributed to (white) femininity during this time at the "centre of empire" saw a correlative shift in the forms and contents of travel accounts by women. Whereas nineteenth-century travel accounts by women had much in common with the confessional genre, Teo detects in later women's works an increasing...