Travel Studies and (de)Coloniality: The Traveller’s Tale workshop, Venice

The “Traveller’s Tale” workshop held at the Warwick Venice Centre on 29-30 November 2024 aimed to take stock of and reflect on the state of the field of travel (writing) studies. Its starting point was the observation that whilst lots of critical scholarship from the 1970s onwards had focused on the coloniality of travel writing, the ways in which the study of travel itself has been shaped by colonial legacies had received much less attention.

In particular, the workshop participants discussed the continuing Eurocentricity of much existing scholarship, even that produced in the vein of postcolonial critique. Although research on non-European travel and travel writing has been growing over the last twenty years, it remains poorly integrated in mainstream discussions about definitions of travel and travel writing, the chronological development of the genre, or specific methodological approaches and thematic perspectives. Consequently, the conceptual development of and methodological tools developed by the interdisciplinary field of travel (writing) studies remain mostly predicated on the implicit or explicit universalising of a particular set of historical experiences. The workshop aimed at identifying ways of moving beyond this scholarly impasse.

A multidisciplinary background

The meeting in Venice was the outcome of, and made possible by, four intersecting projects and conversations. Its title, The Traveller’s Tale: Global Forms and Circulations, was taken from an AHRC application led and designed by Carl Thompson (Surrey) and also involving Nandini Das (Oxford), Natalya Din-Kariuki (Warwick) and myself as co-leads, as well as Professor Tim Youngs (Nottingham Trent) as advisor. An ambitious and transnational project, its aim is to work towards a truly global history of travel writing. The two days we spent at the Venice Centre provided an opportunity for the team to meet face-to-face and discuss the future shape collaborations might take. Carl Thompson introduced the outlines of the project to feedback from Sandra Vlasta (Genoa) and other participants.

The second programme, and the reason the event took place in Venice, was Warwick’s Marco Polo International Programme, which over the past year has hosted events in the UK, China, and Italy to mark the 700th anniversary of the death of Marco Polo. Its activities have also included the restoration of a fourteenth-century document related to Marco Polo by the Warwick Venice Centre director, Luca Molà. On the evening of the first day, Luca guided the workshop participants on a historical walking tour of the Rialto district, which wove together the medieval history of Venice as a centre of global mobility with the problems the city faces today due to excessive tourism and resulting economic and environmental change.

The third programme was the Wheeler History of Travel Writing PhD programme, which launched this Autumn when the first Wheeler PhD-scholars, Anna Bruins and Alfisha Sabri, took up their scholarships. A key aim of the programme is to solidify Warwick’s position as a hub for the global study of travel and travel writing. This was reflected in the workshop, which included colleagues based in English (Natalya Din-Kariuki), the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance (Mathilde Alain), and Global Sustainable Development (Liz Chant) as well as History (Tom Simpson, Anna Bruins, and Alfisha Sabri). Alfisha, Anna, and Mathilde each presented their ongoing research, on (post-)colonial constructions of the Himalayan hill station of Mussoorie, scientific travellers within Dutch East India Company networks, and Francisco Álvares’ account of a sixteenth-century Portuguese embassy to Ethiopia, respectively. They received expert feedback from Tim Youngs, a seminal figure in the field of travel writing studies and founding editor of Studies in Travel Writing, as well as other workshop participants.

Finally, the fourth project that shaped the workshop was the “Decolonising Travel Studies” initiative which Natalya and I began four years ago. It started with an online symposium in November 2021 and will soon result in a special issue with Studies in Travel Writing. The workshop opened with a discussion of the draft introduction to this special issue, entitled “Travel Studies and the Decolonial Turn”, with feedback from Nandini Das, Carl Thompson, Tim Youngs, and others. The conversation highlighted the advantages of a critical engagement with decolonial thought as a way to push the field of travel studies beyond its Eurocentric origins. At the same time, it also emphasised the practical difficulties involved in establishing conversations across genres, languages, and scholarly traditions, and highlighted the potential of articulating a more expansive understanding of travel (writing) as well as the need to take seriously the more-than-human dimensions shaping experiences of travel.

Re-thinking the history of travel and travel writing

Following a day of productive panel presentations and roundtable conversations, Tom Simpson and Liz Chant led an interactive session on travel and maps which took the participants from the Palazzo Giustinian Lolin into Venice’s historical built environment. The workshop concluded with a decolonial museum tour led by Professor Shaul Bassi (Ca’ Foscari), a scholar of English literature and Environmental Humanities and co-author (with Paul Kaplan) of the recent African Venice: A Guide to Art, Culture and People (2024). Consisting of two stops on either side of the Grand Canal, the museum tour juxtaposed the African presence in Venetian Renaissance art on display at the Gallerie dell’Accademia with contemporary African art created by artists in residence at the AKKA Project.

Taking stock of the legacy of figures such as Marco Polo, the workshop considered what a history of travel and travel writing would look like if we paid attention to a much wider set of practices, experiences, forms, and records of mobility than has hitherto been the case. A key rationale was not only to situate the study of travel more fully within a framework of global history, but also to be more attentive to forms of exclusion, marginalisation, and power inequalities that structure travel itself, travel writing, and the academic study of both. A major regret, therefore, is that due to the intractable nature of modern visa regimes and the problem of passport inequality, Alfisha had to participate in the workshop remotely from the UK. It serves as another reminder, if more are needed, that the colonial histories we study and the post-colonial structures we inhabit are inextricably interlinked.

About the author

Dr Guido van MeersbergenLink opens in a new window is a historian of early modern global trade, travel, and diplomacy. He is the current director of the Global History and Culture Centre.

Our researchers in Venice

Warwick's permanent base in Venice holds year-round seminars, and workshops, as well as hosting BA students from History and History of Art for a term abroad.

Notably, Warwick's Venice Centre is the home of the Marco Polo International Programme, which partners Warwick with 36 global institutions.

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