Travel writing

Abstract

Known since antiquity, travel writing has not only enjoyed great popularity in the West, but it has also played a crucial role in the cultural history of the Americas since the late 15th century. Although recordings of pre-contact indigenous travels in the Americas exist (see e.g. Boone 1994), the travelogue as a literary genre was introduced to the region by the European colonizers. It has since been catering to the desire of broadening audiences for geographic and cultural knowledge of unfamiliar places and peoples, for economic, socio-political, or strategic information, as well as for entertainment through captivating stories (Blanton 2002, 7–29). Increasingly diverse, though predominantly Eurocentric for most of its history, the genre has contributed to formulating and circulating hegemonic concepts and “imagined geographies” (Said 1995, 55, 71) of “America” (Rabasa 1993; Mignolo 2005) that inform public discourses, knowledge, and power relations to this day.