Radicals on the Road: The Politics of English Travel Writing in the 1930s

Preface

Name /V1921/V1921_FM 09/11/01 06:13AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 9 # 9 P R E F A C E M Y F A S C I N A T I O N with travel preceded my interest in travel writing by several years. In 1987 and 1988 I spent fourteen months abroad, backpacking through large tracts of Asia, followed by a stay Down Under and a slow hitchhiking trip up the Alaska Highway. One place in particular left an indelible mark on my memory. Like many Western travelers, in fact in accordance with a long-standingtradition , I felt that Tibet taught me an important lesson.1 Inmycase,itwas politics rather than Tibet’s usual association, with spirituality, that determined the nature of my ‘‘epiphany’’: I arrived in Lhasa at the very moment in 1987 when the smoldering political unrest in this ‘‘autonomous region’’ erupted into open violence. The riots of October 1987 were sparked by the beating and imprisonment of a group of monks who had been caught waving the Tibetan flag and shouting slogans for Tibetan independence. When news broke about their arrest, a mob of Tibetans stormed the police station where the monks were held, freed them, and burned down the building. In response, Chinese troops began to shoot into the crowd from rooftops surrounding the area, killing and injuring scores of Tibetans.2 At this point, my relationship to China became quite hostile. While traveling in other provinces of China, I had seen too much of communism ’s potential for breeding conformity, lethargy, and irresponsibility to be well disposed toward the authoritarian manifestations of Beijing’s policy on minorities. As a result, I began to dislike Chinese people and their culture with an intensity that surprised me. In the Name /V1921/V1921_FM 09/11/01 06:13AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 10 # 10 meantime, I found Tibet to be a land of austere, pure beauty whose inhabitants deserved my unconditional respect and trust. It took me a while to admit that my political zeal had colored almost all of my perceptions about China in general and Tibet in particular . I came to realize, too, that I may have been wrong-headed in some of my opinions. Although I never changed my stance on Tibet, I began to differentiate between China’s governmental policy and the spirit of its people. By one of life’s more pleasant ironies, I married a Chinese citizen four years after my troubled journey in her country. And it was in my domestic life, subsequently, that I began a gradual, slow return voyage to her home country. During my actual trip in China, I had been too ideologically biased, my mind already made up, to have an appropriate sociocultural perspective on the country and its people. Prolonged traveling entails all manner of initiations and often sets the stage for new departures in our lives. One significant outcome of my trip was a growing interest in travel literature. This, in turn, energized my professional life, and I even began my academic career by teaching a seminar on travel literature at Duke University. The two travel writers who, among other authors on my first syllabus, made the most lasting impression on me were Graham Greene and George Orwell . In an intriguing variant of the common pattern, their journeys struck me as ideograms of political conviction, rather than as mere celebrations of adventure or as inventories of foreign anomalies. When I tried to find more examples of this type of travel book, I realized that political travel writing had never flourished better than in the 1930s, that is, precisely when Orwell and Greene (as well as a host of other British intellectuals) had embarked on their radical journeys. This convinced me that something extraordinary had happened in Britain during the 1930s—with regard to both travel and politics—and I wanted to get to the bottom of it. Radicals on the Road represents the outcome of my inquiries into the relationship between ideological trajectories and real journeys, between places and their political mapping, and between radical rhetoric and the dictates of experience. x P R E F A C E ...