Anxiety of Displacement: Asiatic Travellers in Europe

Abstract

HiKyoung MoonThe genre of the “foreign observer in Europe” has often been seen as a reflection of the European attempt to accommodate the Other as Europe expanded into other cultures and civilizations. Under the influence of Said, the genre has often been placed within the discourses of cultural encounters, Western hegemony, and colonialism. In this paper, I argue that this genre of writing reflects not the confident rationalism and cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment but rather a deep sense of dislocation and self-alienation that the heroes undergo during the course of their travels. These pseudo-Orientals are sites onto which are projected all the anxieties and unease that travel and displacement can foster. These fictions create a liminal space between cultures in which the travellers act out imaginatively the experience of crossing boundaries and of encountering the unfamiliar. In this paper I therefore challenge the widely accepted idea of travel as being emancipating and educational, upon which is built the eighteenth-century ideal of cosmopolitanism, and attempt to explore the darker currents that lie under the perception of crossing boundaries, geographical, cultural, and psychological. For this reason, I also see the foreign observer not so much as a satiric mouthpiece but more as a novelistic character and will focus on three major texts of this genre: Marana’s Turkish Spy (1684), Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721), and Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World (1762).