Migrant mobility occupies an important space within postcolonial criticism. From Homi Bhabha's influential writings on the liminality of the migrant experience to the numerous critical works on diasporic cultural production, a range of conceptual terms has evolved to enable new ways of thinking about the experiences and consequences of mass postcolonial travel practices. However, this critical vocabulary, a corollary of contemporary theory's mobility turn, has often been the subject of heated debate, particularly when the movement concerned has been abstracted from important social and cultural variables. For example, in her important study of the different uses of travel-related language in post-modern discourse, Caren Kaplan speaks of the tendency of ‘Euro-American discourses of displacement […] to absorb difference and create a historical amalgams’. Janet Wolff's judgement on the ‘vocabularies of travel’ that have saturated recent critical discourse identifies them as ‘gendered [and] just as the practices and ideologies of actual travel operate to exclude or pathologize women, so the use of that vocabulary as metaphor necessarily produces androcentric tendencies in theory’. And in his discussion of the nomad, ‘the geographic metaphor par excellence of postmodernity’, sociologist Tim Cresswell warns against theoretical generalizations that flatten out difference and transform this travelling figure into ‘a remarkably unsocial being – unmarked by the traces of class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and geography’.

Literary criticism of travel has been relatively successful in historicizing and rescuing Western women's textualizations of travel, and challenging the notion of travel discourses as being exclusively masculinist.