Earlier chapters have referred to the widespread contemporary critical view that, ‘By producing knowledge about the other and circulating colonial stereotypes, travel writing is implicated in the reproduction of colonialism’, an argument that leads some critics to ‘consider the travelogue an essentially imperialist mode of representation’. The present chapter will examine some of the consequences of, and challenges to, the colonial legacy.

Writing at the end of the twentieth century, Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan stated: ‘Travel writing today is beginning to take on a multicultural ethos. It is becoming increasingly difficult to justify the traveler’s “one-way” vision – his or her perception, regulated from the imagined safety of the metropolis, of people, places, and cultures seen as alien or remote’. We saw in Chapter 5 that modernism helped introduce into travel literature an appreciation of other perspectives, just as it did in other cultural forms. The limitations of a single point of view have been apparent for many years. Barbara Korte rightly acknowledges that ‘Reversing the colonizer’s direction of travel … is a travel pattern encountered long before the emergence of postcolonialism’, although the practice predates by centuries the examples given by Korte. That said, diasporic movement, decolonisation and postcolonialism have undermined in a more concentrated way the claims to universal authority of a white, metropolitan standpoint. In addition, postcolonial studies of travel writing have grown more nuanced, going beyond crude models of domination to take into account local resistance and what Mary Louise Pratt calls transculturation. Pratt explains: