Discourses of Difference in Philip Glazebrook’s Journey to Kars (1984)

Atalay Gunduz (Ege University, Turkey) [BIO]

Email: atalaygunduz@hotmail.com

 

ABSTRACT:

As a part of rationalizing and legitimizing imperialism, Orientalism exaggerated, promoted, rewrote, and distorted “the sense of difference between the European and Asiatic parts of the world” (Said). Edward Said also maintains that Orientalism, as an ideological position aspiring to the reflection of reality, is based on the structure which furthers “the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, “us”) and the strange (the Orient, the East, “them”)”. According to Said, Westerners have had a certain advantage and “privilege” over the Oriental as “his was the stronger culture, he could penetrate, he could wrestle with, he could give shape and meaning to the great Asiatic mystery . . . [relying on] the constricted vocabulary of such a privilege and [being invalidated by] the comparative limitations of such a vision . . . .” Similarly, Sara Mills argues that there are lots of different constraints on a writer’s work and that a work can hardly exist free of these restrictions and constraints other works have created. Mills also highlights the relation between travel writing and imperialism and how imperialist discourse influences the conventions of travel writing. She also argues that most travel writers represent “members of the other nation through a conceptual and textual grid constituted by travel books” (73). Taking his journey to imagine how the nineteenth century travelers felt on the Ottoman Turkey, Philip Glazebrook’s Journey to Kars (1984) is a highly inter-textual travelogue which owes its themes and itinerary to the nineteenth century British travelers. This paper will discuss how Journey to Kars is determined by the restrictions of travel writing as a genre and how Glazebrook uses the nineteenth century travelogues to construct his discourse of difference.