Travel writing needs to reflect a more complex order

“It has been my prejudice and hope ever since I began reading and traveling that what we need now is a travel writing that reflects a larger world and a much more complex order, one in which a post-national empire is almost everywhere, and the American Empire is fading from view as the British and the French ones did before it—though, thanks to the acceleration of the times, it has worked its way through the cycle at record speed. We have too much exposure now to other cultures—at home and abroad—and they are too intertwined for us to be able to start ascribing good or evil to any one of them. We are likely to see El Salvador, Ethiopia, and India in our neighborhood, in our beds, even in our bloodstreams. The Other is inside us now, and we are…a confounding mix of conqueror and conquered…”
–Pico Iyer, “Travel Writing: Nowhere Need Be Foreign“, Lapham’s Quarterly, Summer 2009