Since the publication of Said’s book Orientalism, travel literature has always been mentioned in association with colonial, and post-colonial literature. Jolanta Sztachelska claims that “the nineteenth century in Europe was the period of travel mania.” The purpose of this obsession with travel was very simple: profit with the leitmotiv commonly known as civilizing mission . For Nicklas Hållénm “travel literature about Africa… has more to do with [Western] colonial travel literature than with Africa or actual African regions, histories and linguistic or national communities.” This epidemy of travel from the West to the East, though having ambiguous consequences, is bitterly criticized by post-colonial theorists agreeing one common denominator that “Travel writing and postcolonial studies are common bedfellows, the first (a ‘genre’) a staple source for the second (a scholarly enterprise, if not a bordered discipline).” The reason for the reference of postcolonialism to travel literature is that there can be no colonialism without travel. The colonizer always leaves his land to occupy and exploit the “other” person’s land, the “other land” which he may later claim as a property. Carl Thompson, refers to the role of travel literature as “instrumental in the economy and machinery of Empire: if the imperial centre depended on representations of its peripheries and others to know itself, and to provide a sense of ownership, entitlement and legitimacy, travel writing served up plenty of material for that purpose.” Here we see that the self-knowing of the colonial West results from discovering or creating, the “other” through a certain binary discourse.
If postcolonialism is definable through time and inter-discursiveness, travel literature, as one of its sources, has been-and is still being-defined and re-defined over and over again, every now and then. Simply put in other words, there is no consensus about travel literature, just as there is no consensus about the use of the word “travel.” The word or, linguistically speaking, the sign “travel” is not like a coin composed of two sides, one being the signifier and the other the signified from a structuralist perspective. As a matter of fact, from a deconstructive point of view, the signifier, which is, here, the word “travel” can have many signifieds, which are the concepts to which the word might refer since, if we borrow Derrida’s words, “There is never a pure signified.” This means that there is always a signifier behind another signifier; in other words, there is no one single definition of things. Things are to be and will always be defined and redefined since it is very clear that the articulated language, being the attribute of human who is the most complex being to study, cannot be trusted.
According to Paul Fussel,“the terms exploration, travel, and tourism are slippery. In 1855 what we would call exploration is often called travel. .” This, indeed, can be seen from the titles of books written by explorers. Many of whom we nowadays classify as explorers referred to themselves in their books as “travellers.” Fussell goes further to argue in these terms:
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No traveler, and certainly no tourist, is ever knighted for his performances, although the strains he may undergo can be as memorable as the explorer's. All three make journeys, but the explorer seeks the undiscovered, the traveler that which has been discovered by the mind working in history, the tourist that which has been discovered by entrepreneurship and prepared for him by the arts of mass publicity. The genuine traveler is, or used to be, in the middle between the two extremes. If the explorer moves toward the risks of the formless and the unknown, the tourist moves toward the security of pure cliche. It is between these two poles that the traveler mediates.
The journey of the explorer is very risky, while safety is the essence of tourism. The explorer is like a blindfolded person walking quickly on a roof, looking for a lost treasure while ignoring exactly where it is, which was the case with Europeans concerning Timbuktu or the East. However, exploration in the European discourse is seen as travel or tourism in the East, for if people of the East accept the term exploration, then they are but terming themselves as strangers in their own lands. In other words, Westerners were only strangers, and a stranger see nothing even if his/her two eyes are open wide, so it is not surprising when they say that the East was dark even if they were walking under the sun and the moon.
The tourist is walking with a light guiding him, knowing where exactly s/he is going and what s/he is going to have, for nothing is new in tourism; on the contrary, everything is known, for fame requires that a certain thing, person, or place be known by many people. The position of the traveller is ambivalent, being half-tourist and half-explorer, s/he stands hybrid between security and risk. The traveller, susceptible to being torn between pleasure and risk, is like a worker. It is in this context that“travel is work. Etymologically a traveler is one who suffers travail, a word deriving in its turn from Latin tripaliwn, a torture instrument consisting of three stakes designed to rack the body.”
As travel is “travail,” which, in French, means work resulting in torment whose end is satisfaction or pleasure, some may deduce that travel literature consists of the accounts of sufferings and satisfactions of a traveler, the “self”, in the quest of the “other.” This is plausible since that “other” may hospitably accept or resist the “self.” “Travel books,” for Paul Fussel, “are a sub-species of memoir in which the autobiographical narrative arises from the speaker's encounter with distant or unfamiliar data, and in which the narrative—unlike that in a novel or a romance claims literal validity by constant reference to actuality.” Stefano Calzati partly admits Paul Fussel’s definition, pointing out about travel writing what he refers to as “the dualistic position about autobiography and memoir”, since, as he argues, “travel writing is regarded more generally as a subjective narrative; that is, a narrative in which the narrator[the self] is part of the story (either as an I, or a we).” However, this might not always be the case. Travel writing encompasses books of third-person narrative. As examples, we can mention parts of biographies about travel, where someone relates the experiences of another one who might have perished on his journey without having related or written his own story, or who might have been incapable of doing so due to illiteracy.
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