“Postcolonial” Travel: Of Empires and the Empirical
Kate Roy, Franklin Switzerland
Drawing on walking tours experienced on two Academic Travels in the discipline of Postcolonial Studies, I seek to explore where Academic Travel’s desire for authenticity goes head to head with the institutionalization, commodification and consumption of postcolonialism as travel experience. Moving through a consideration of the ambiguities of Postcolonial Studies in the academy, the tensions Graham Huggan has identified between postcolonialism (as resistance practice to Western systems and structures – also of thought) and postcoloniality (the commodification of difference), my contribution aims to uncover the ways in which these ambiguous dynamics are replicated in “postcolonial” travel, suspended between highlighting the continuing power of the colonial system in action in tourism practice and the marketing of historical and contemporary spaces in a commercialization of postcolonial cultural production and the fetishization of difference. Answering calls to take the postcolonial “outside” and critically engage with and theorize pedagogy on the ground, I describe how our move into the empirical, in Berlin’s “Afrikanisches Viertel” (African Quarter) and in the Parisian district of La Goutte d’Or, brought an empir(e)ical experience, a chronotopal thickening, a dialog between time, space, history, all of the various actors involved and the narratives and representations brought to the space, producing site-and-time-specific ways of telling that thereby enmeshed us in our own practice and confronted us not only with the significance of the socio-political moment, but also, in a productive discomfort, with ourselves.
KEY WORDS: Postcolonial Studies, Postcolonial Travel, Frontstage/Backstage, Cultural Tourism, Cultural Memory, Chronotope