Culture of travel and spatial formations of knowledge

Abstract

Recent work has emphasised two, acutely material ways in which geography was written into the production of knowledge within the expansive, colonising imaginary of post-Enlightenment Europe: how was it possible for those who stayed at home to believe the reports of those who had travelled abroad? and how was it possible for local, non-European knowledges to be brought within the framework of a supposedly sovereign European Reason? This essay considers a third thematic that also shaped productions of knowledge through productions of space: the modalities through which the routes described by travellers (their paths and circuits) shaped their descriptions of those routes (their texts). Three topologies are identified that entered into spatial formations of knowledge in the long nineteenth century. The first is a rhizomatic space (a complex space with no centre), illustrated through critical readings of Alexander von Humboldt's travels through the Amazon and Mary Kingsley's travels in West Africa; the second is a labyrinthine space (a complex space with a centre), illustrated through Sophia Poole's journeys through Cairo; the third is a striated space (an ordered, linear space), illustrated through the ways in which Europe was itself scripted by the Grand Tour and the modern guidebook. In each case the emphasis is on the ways in which the spaces of topography and text are folded into and out of one another and thus shape - literally 'form' - spatial formations that are constellations of power, knowledge and geography.