Marian Botsford Fraser on the post-colonial journey

“The heroic is no longer compelling. There are few places under the sun that cannot be found with the help of global positioning technology. Almost anyone can get to the top of a remote glacier and send a photo home via satellite phone. Travel, and travel literature, used to be about being the first person to do or see something; it is increasingly about being the last to chronicle a shrinking wilderness or witness a creature facing extinction. And in a world in which exodus and exile are the journeys that matter — Zimbabweans swimming across the Limpopo to South Africa, Somalis fleeing to Yemen, Burmese refugee camps in the borderlands of Thailand — the great white perspective on the exotic seems irrelevant, even insulting.”
–Marian Botsford Fraser, “Post-Colonial Journeys,” The Walrus, Summer 2008