Description: The essays gathered in In Transit focus on issues arising from the historical nexus between travel and imperialism. Contributors investigate the ways in which specific imperial projects were inextricably linked to developments in travel technologies and practices. At the same time, this collection reveals that imperial fantasies of exploration and conquest, whether actualized or not, irrevocably shaped the formulation of travel as a category of modern experience, as a rite/right of passage, and as a type of embodied knowledge. This dynamic, reciprocal relationship between imperialism and travel is examined in relation to written and pictorial documents produced at different historical moments and across a broad range of geographical locations, including India, Borneo, the Caribbean, South Africa, Australia, Britain, Polynesia, and Papua New Guinea.
Review Quotes: «Travel is the first principle of colonial encounter. Discourses of travel continue to underwrite imperial relations in an unequal world. 'In Transit' seeks to understand the ubiquity of travel in the colonial record not by reaching for a general theory of the practice and its modes of representation, but by grounding specific travel activities to their technological and ideological conditions of possibility. This superb collection demonstrates that the processes of subject-formation under empire are radically contingent on mobility and its limits. It reveals that travel writing is a genre that knows no institutional boundaries, and it proves that a critical respect for historical specificity is the impassable ground zero of genuinely explanatory postcolonial critique.» (Stephen Slemon, Department of English, University of Alberta)