Discovering the world through non-European eyes: 1500 years

beatriz

Discovering the world through non-European eyes
Other Routes: 1500 years of African and Asian Travel Writing, Tabish Khair, Justin Edwards, Martin Leer & Hanna Ziadeh, eds., Oxford: Signal Books, 2006. pp420
Reviewed by Hicham Safieddine, Al-Ahram Weekly

Travel! Set out for pastures new
Life tastes richer when you have road-worn feet.
No water that stagnates is fit to drink,
For only that which flows is truly sweet.
--- Attributed to Imam al-Shafi'

Drama is life with the dull bits left out, according to master filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock. The same could be said of good travel writing. However, in Other Routes: 1500 years of African and Asian Travel Writing, this piece of wisdom sometimes seems to have escaped the editors, notwithstanding the valuable, and sometimes exciting, material they present.

Part of an ambitious project to resurrect non-European travel writing as proof of a longstanding tradition of the genre outside the European continent, the editors of this book argue that eurocentrism is an unsatisfactory way of understanding the contemporary world, as this world has grown out of a colonial experience that was strongly associated with the desire on the part of the European colonisers to subjugate the colonised peoples by "discovering," "stereotyping," or otherwise "categorising" them. Though the book's project is a worthy one, highlighting the need for further exploration of this subject, too often this comes at the cost of having to go through texts that seem either to be irrelevant to the book's general theme, or are filled with the dull parts of life without apparently serving any larger purpose. The inclusion of extracts from the diary of Queen Emma of Hawaii, whose relevance to African or Asian routes is not explained, is a case in point.
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Continue reading this fascinating article: Al-Ahram Weekly, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/788/bo9.htm