Page 213 - Cultural Theory

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••• Ann Brooks •••

depends with destruction’. Clifford, as hooks notes, attempts to expand: ‘the
travel/theoretical frontiers so that it might be more inclusive, … and put alongside it
or in its place a theory on the journey that would expose the extent to which hold-
ing onto the concept of “travel” as we know it is also a way to hold onto imperial-
ism’ (hooks, 1992: 343).
Travel theory provides an interesting conceptual framework for exploring different
sets of relationships and different representations. For some, as hooks notes, con-
ventional conceptualizations of travel maintain a fascination with imperialism and
convey what Rosaldo (1988) refers to as ‘imperialist nostalgia’. However, theorizing
travel outside these ‘conventional borders’ offers possibilities for using: ‘travel as a
starting point for discourse … associated with different headings – rites of passage,
immigration, enforced migration, relocation, enslavement, homelessness …
Theorizing diverse journeying is crucial to our understanding of any politics of loca-
tion’ (hooks, 1992: 343).
Clifford shows in his work that theory is not conceptualized in a vacuum and is
always written from a specific location where place often marks ‘different concrete
histories of dwelling, immigration, exile, migration’. As hooks goes on to note, it is
imperative to understand the hegemonic implications of one experience of travel
which can make another experience impossible to be heard. ‘From certain stand-
points, to travel is to encounter the terrorizing force of white supremacy’ (ibid.: 344).
The relationship between inter-racial looking and representing whiteness is a com-
plex one and is conveyed in literary and cinematographic discourses. There is a sig-
nificant history of film, conveying different aspects of ‘inter-racial looking relations’.
Kaplan explores: ‘structures of the gaze in film images of white males traveling to
expatriate foreign lands in the nineteenth and ealy twentieth centuries, through
complex gaze and looking structures in the travels of white women, traveling in
men’s wake with a variety of motives, (1997: 14). Kaplan highlights the contradictory
position of white colonial women travelers whose subjectivities are ‘caught between
objectification in white patriarchy and white privilege in colonialism’ (ibid.: 15). She
contextualizes the position of this group of women within the hegemonic structure
of the ‘male (patriarchal) gaze’ and the ‘imperial gaze’.
Lidia Curti (1996) provides an interesting analysis of one such woman and her rep-
resentation in film. Curti focuses on the intersection of imperialist and subaltern dis-
courses in the traveller Jane Bowles’s writing and in her subsequent representation in
films drawn from a number of books written by male authors. Curti describes Bowles,
who was born in 1917 and spent much of her life in Tangier and died in a psychi-
atric institution in Malaga in 1973, as ‘a nomadic writer, in some ways a typical
American intellectual, like – and at the same time unlike – other occidental women
writers, who in the first half of this century went to Europe, particularly Paris, in
search of their art and themselves’ (Curti, 1996: 124). Like many other women trav-
ellers, in her travelling she ‘was observed’, travelling as Curti notes ‘by the male gaze’.
A number of male writers observed Jane Bowles’s travelling, including her husband
and fellow traveller Paul Bowles, as well as other writers including William
Burroughs, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal and others. Curti shows
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