Drew Madson, an English student at the College of Saint Benedict, recently contacted me with a query for an essay he was writing for his contemporary lit and post-colonial lit classes. His topic of inquiry was Edward Said’s book Orientalism, which claims that Western knowledge of the East was created in a discursive environment — extracted and born in realm separate from reality. Madson writes:

What I wonder, and is of pressing concern, is if contemporary travel writing, such as Pico Iyer’s and yours are still operating with one foot in the discursive enterprise. Is the Orient still partly the orient or has it become the human? Does Video Night in Kathmandu show the reader a reverence for humanity both Eastern and Western, or does it unintentionally revert to a mystical orient through its exotic images?

This is what I told him:

I think Edward Said overstated his case in Orientalism. As is often the danger in academic circles, Said was so busy finding evidence to support his thesis that he tended to overlook everything that contradicted it. Recently, writers such as Robert Irwin and Paul Berman have brought up how Said not only ignored the Western scholars who were empathetic about the East, he also was selective about the lives/writings of those scholars he chose to write about. I might also add that Said’s analysis was itself lopsided, since he neglected to mention Eastern writers and their misrepresentations of the West — hence missing the point that cross-cultural misunderstanding/misrepresentation is a human thing, not a Western thing. I touch on this in an essay I wrote for The Believer last fall, “The Tourist Who Influenced the Terrorists.”

In short, I think that the academic world has been so obsessed with colonialism in recent decades that it forgets about the human workings that underpin any cross-cultural exchange. When Ibn Battuta traveled in the age of Islamic Empire, he wasn’t any more even-handed than Richard Burton was in the days of British Empire. So, while I agree that there’s plenty of discursive discourse in cross-cultural writings, I might point out that this is inevitable to a certain extent. Scholars should definitely be self-policing about this, but they shouldn’t get carried away and say it’s the exclusive vice of the West. Power and empire might affect the way information is communicated, but the accounts of people subject to that power are just as given to exaggeration and prejudice. Everyone, in effect, preaches to the choir — including Said, who knew how to skew his polemic (and assume the mantle of Easterner, even though he was an elite Christian Ivy Leaguer) to attract the attention of his fellow scholars. Academic language is, after all, a largely Western manifestation.

That said, Said has probably contributed to an awareness among writers who’ve traveled to the East in recent decades — an awareness to not make assumptions too broadly. Still, we can’t help but write through our own cultural lenses. When I note that individualism is not a virtue in China, I am making that observation as my cultural self — an American individualist. To write in a culturally neutral manner is an impossible and vaguely ridiculous notion. Sometimes, in fact, it’s good to boldly assert your own cultural prejudices, and use them to evaluate a place, as Paul Theroux has in examining corruption in Africa.

So I think some type of “orientalism” will always come through in travel writing, even if an effort is made to avoid it (and many such efforts at prejudice-avoidance end up cloaked in the language of political correctness, which is itself an audience-driven Western construct that has little to do with human reality).

In the end, travel writers must simply do their best to avoid stereotyping, and make the effort to be fair and accurate about the places they visit.