Literature, Travel, and Empire

Delving into Literature, Travel, and Empire reveals how literary works have shaped and been shaped by global movements, from colonial expansion to postcolonial identity. This article explores key texts and historical contexts, making complex ideas accessible for students studying this fascinating intersection of culture and power. We'll examine how authors like Daniel Defoe and Samuel Selvon used narratives to reflect or challenge imperial ideologies, and how travel itself became a central theme in understanding national identity and global relations.

The Roots of Travel Literature and Imperialism

Travel and literature have long been intertwined, particularly during Britain's rise as a dominant sea power in the 18th century. Expanded trade routes, scientific explorations, and the thrust of empire made travel more accessible. This period saw a surge in Britons traveling both domestically and abroad, leading to a rich output of travel literature.

• Increased Mobility: Improvements in roads, coaches, and shipping allowed people of all classes to travel with relative ease and economy.
• Cultural Exchange: The Grand Tour, for example, sent well-to-do young gentlemen to Europe, fostering linguistic and cultural learning.
• Emergence of the Novel: The 18th century also marked the rise of the English novel, a genre often overlapping with travel writing in form and content, with journeys at its literal and literary center.

Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and the Colonial Mindset

Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) is a pivotal work in understanding literature's role in empire. Inspired by accounts of marooned Scotsman Andrew Selkirk, the novel became a bestseller and established a vogue for apparent autobiography and far-flung adventures.

• Imperial Identity: Crusoe's character reflects the swelling pride of Englishness and the association of national prominence with colonial activities. He imagines himself in grandiose terms, replicating the culture's view of itself.
• Defusing Insecurities: The novel affirmed the exceptional nature of the English subject, suggesting that self-mastery could lead to mastery over destiny, others, and economic contingencies.
• The Colonial Setting: The colonial world provides a context for a common Englishman to become a master, a king, and an emperor, asserting himself over land and people. Friday, the "cultural inferior," serves as a mirror, reinforcing Crusoe's authority and self-image.
• Naming and Ownership: Crusoe's act of naming his companion "Friday" and teaching him to say "Master" is seen as an act of possession, nullifying Friday's identity and history while transforming him into a "carbon copy" through education.

The Robinsonade: Exploring Empire Through Fiction

Defoe's novel spawned numerous imitations and extensions known as robinsonades. These narratives offered metropolitan readers a felicitous way to explore the wider world of the British Empire.

• Educational Value: Jean Jacques Rousseau praised Robinson Crusoe as a treatise on natural education. Thomas Spence even envisioned Crusonia as a utopia where all property was held in common.
• Moral Lessons: Works like Swiss Family Robinson (1816) used the island setting to teach orthodox Christian moral lessons through encounters with exotic environments and inhabitants.
• Profound Effect on Colonial Readers: Early American writer Charles Brockden Brown saw Crusoe's adventures as a picture of how mankind disperses, colonizes desert regions, and founds new communities.

From Imperial Certainty to Invasion Fears

By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the confident imperial narrative began to erode. Growing international rivalries and colonial unrest fostered anxieties that manifested in a new genre: invasion literature.

Invasion Literature and Imperial Anxieties

This alarmist body of popular fiction, burgeoning between 1870 and WWI, reflected intensifying concerns that imperial expansion could have serious drawbacks, including the threat of invasion to Britain itself.

• Franco-Prussian War Impact: Germany's swift victory over France (1870-71) shocked Europe, highlighting advanced military techniques and technology, and sparking fears of similar attacks on other nations.
• The Battle of Dorking (1871): Lieutenant-Colonel George Tomkyns Chesney's fictional work posited a German invasion of Britain, causing an uproar and contributing to a public campaign for military "preparedness."
• Evolution of the Genre: The highly motivated short story replaced factual tracts as the primary means to disseminate invasion concerns. By the 1890s, with deteriorating international relations, the invasion tale gained major momentum.
• Shifting Threats: Initially, Germany was the primary threat, later joined by France and Russia in the 1890s, before a firm swing back to Germany in the early 20th century.
• Global Conflicts: Predictions of world-wide war and speculation about futuristic technology like airships and submarines became common.

Broader Invasion Concerns: Beyond Military Engagements

Invasion literature wasn't limited to explicit depictions of future wars. Broader imperial anxieties manifested obliquely across a wider range of popular literary modes.

• Two-Way Imperial Traffic: These stories reflected anxieties about colonial dissent spreading beyond colonies and the large-scale immigration of "undesirable" colonial subjects into "white" society.
• Fin-de-Siècle Gothic: This included oriental invasion or "yellow peril" tales, often associated with the gothic trope of the supernatural intruder.
• Early Crime and Detective Fiction: The foreign criminal became a dominant figure, with colonial themes and anxieties abounding in works like Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes canon (e.g., Professor Moriarty, The Sign of Four with its Indian Mutiny backdrop).

Reverse Colonization in Late-Victorian Fiction

Late-Victorian fiction, particularly horror, is saturated with a sense of national decline, making Britain vulnerable. Narratives of reverse colonization emerged, where the colonizer finds himself in the position of the colonized.

• Dracula (1897): Bram Stoker's novel enacts this pervasive narrative, where the "civilized" world is threatened with colonization by "primitive" forces. Dracula's ability to appropriate and transform bodies leads to a literal "going native" and a new racial identity, highlighting fears of miscegenation and the annihilation of a weaker race.
• Critique of Imperialism: Such narratives, while often fantastical, contain the potential for powerful critiques of imperialist ideologies, often representing reverse colonization as a deserved punishment for imperial sins.

Postcolonial Voices: Reimagining Britain and Language

The mid-20th century saw a new wave of literature, often by authors from formerly colonized nations, challenging existing narratives and defining new cultural identities within former imperial centers.

Samuel Selvon: The Father of Black Writing in Britain

Samuel Selvon, an East Indian Trinidadian who migrated to London in the 1950s, is a key figure in the literary reimagining of Britain during the post-war years. He is often called the "father of black writing" in Britain.

• Racial Tensions: Selvon frequently highlighted the volatile atmosphere of post-war Britain, where despite holding British passports, colonial citizens faced racial disturbances (e.g., 1958) and exclusionary government policies (1962 Immigration Act).
• Metaphor of Existence: His characters' room-based existence in London becomes a powerful metaphor for their in-between state, both inside and outside English culture.

The Lonely Londoners: Voice and Decolonization

Selvon's The Lonely Londoners (1956) represents a major step in linguistic and cultural decolonization, influencing generations of writers. His initial aim was to capture the mid-century migrant experience and distil the ordinary language of the people.

• The Vernacular as Literary Language: Selvon faced difficulty starting the novel in "straight English." By writing both narrative and dialogue in a creolized language – an amalgamation of "what I believed was thought of as a Caribbean dialect" – the novel "just shot along."
• Caribbean Consciousness: Using creolized language for the narrative voice defined a unique Caribbean consciousness within a British context, giving legitimacy to a Caribbean way of thinking and speaking.
• Repurposing English: The novel owns the colonial language, presenting English back to readers "new and repurposed," making it a literary language understood by European readers while retaining the essence of Caribbean speech.
• Voiceless Characters: It gives perspective to previously voiceless characters, with the voices of the narrator and the character Moses sometimes merging. The novel also employs a non-linear structure.

The Black City: London Through New Eyes

The Lonely Londoners offers a social realist portrayal of the hardship and hustle faced by black migrants in London, a city that saw them as both a threat and an "exotic sexual thrill."

• Romance and Disenchantment: London is depicted as a "promised land" that, despite its "glittering lure," often turns out to be an illusion, a "magnet and nightmare" for new colonial citizens.
• Racialized Spaces: The novel exposes economic deprivation and racist employment and housing practices, showing Selvon's characters inhabiting a hidden world of derelict and racialized spaces.
• Contrasting Perspectives: The world-weary Moses contrasts with Galahad's constant optimism, expressed through a "'summer is hearts' lyricism." Galahad, as a "cocky mock-epic hero," confidently walks the city streets.
• Literary Tradition: Selvon innovates an existing tradition of writing about London (e.g., Dickens, Eliot, Woolf) by offering a new way of reading and writing the city.

Malorie Blackman and Postcolonial Literature Today

Contemporary authors continue to explore themes of race, empire, and identity. Malorie Blackman's Noughts & Crosses series is a prime example of postcolonial literature using speculative fiction to explore systemic racism.

• Empathy Through Literature: Blackman, whose parents were part of the Windrush generation from Barbados, uses literature as a medium for empathy.
• Alternative Britain: Set in Albion, an alternative Britain colonized by Africa, the series inverts racial hierarchies. Black people (Crosses) are privileged and white people (Noughts) are poorer and institutionally discriminated against.
• The Noughts & Crosses Series:
• Book 1 (2001): Focuses on the illicit romance between Sephy Hadley (privileged Cross) and Callum McGregor (Nought son of the Hadleys' housekeeper).
• Sequels (Knife Edge, Checkmate): Follow Sephy and Callum's daughter, Callie Rose.
• Later Books (Double Cross, Crossfire, Endgame): Address contemporary issues like racialized gang wars, a Nought prime minister, a pandemic, and a "Nought Lives Matter" movement, demonstrating the series' ongoing relevance.

FAQ: Understanding Literature, Travel, and Empire

What is the significance of travel in early English novels?

Travel was central to the emergence of the English novel in the 18th century, literally and literarily. It allowed authors to explore vast new worlds, depict expanding trade routes, and comment on societal structures, often intertwining with the rise of the British Empire and the development of individual selfhood.

How did Robinson Crusoe contribute to imperial ideology?

Robinson Crusoe affirmed the exceptional nature of the English subject, depicting Crusoe's ability to master himself, his destiny, and others in a colonial setting. It also demonstrated the economic benefits of colonial expansion and the "enlargement" of the venturing self in a global context, ultimately portraying Crusoe as a "King and Lord" of his island fiefdom.

What is invasion literature and what anxieties did it reflect?

Invasion literature was a genre of alarmist fiction from 1870-WWI, depicting the potential military invasion of Britain. It reflected anxieties about intensifying imperial rivalries, the drawbacks of continuous imperial expansion, the perceived vulnerability of Britain, and fears of colonial dissent spreading to the imperial center, often linking to broader concerns about "undesirable" immigration.

How did Samuel Selvon challenge colonial language and perspectives?

Samuel Selvon challenged colonial language by using a creolized Caribbean dialect for both the narrative and dialogue in The Lonely Londoners. This act defined a Caribbean consciousness within a British context, gave legitimacy to Caribbean speech, and presented English back to readers as a "new and repurposed" literary language, giving voice to previously marginalized migrant experiences.

What is reverse colonization in literature?

Reverse colonization is a narrative trope, particularly prevalent in late-Victorian fiction like Dracula, where the colonizer finds themselves in the position of the colonized, the exploiter becomes exploited, or the "civilized" world is threatened by "primitive" forces. It reflects fears of national decline and can serve as a powerful, albeit often unrealized, critique of imperialist ideologies, sometimes framing the reversal as a deserved punishment.