Dr Guido van Meersbergen and Dr Natalya Din-Kariuki, University of Warwick The “Decolonising Travel Studies” project led by Natalya Din-Kariuki (English and Comparative Literary Studies) and Guido van Meersbergen (History) seeks to make visible and challenge the indebtedness of both academic and public histories of travel to Eurocentric notions rooted in the colonial past. The primacy long accorded both in formal education and popular narratives (e.g. in museum exhibitions, public commemorations, literature and film) to concepts such as geographic discovery, naval exploration, or scientific advance, bound up with notions of heroism and national pride, has cemented the centrality of the white male traveller with claims to being the first European to set foot in a place or describe it. This systematic privileging of certain forms of travel and its recording to the exclusion of others in the way travel history is commonly understood points towards the structural inequalities of race, gender, and class built into the knowledge we consume as much as the institutions that produce it. The proposed workshop will consist of two parts. The first will introduce the “Decolonising Travel Studies” project as a practical example of an attempt to bring decolonial thought to bear on research, teaching, and institutional culture, the latter referring to our work with a leading British publisher of travel accounts with its own history of colonial entanglement. The second part will encourage participant to identify and reflect on the role colonial travel and travel writing has played in the formation of disciplinary knowledge in different academic fields (e.g. geography, history, literature, anthropology, cartography, natural and earth sciences) as well as the ways in which the practice of travel continues to be shaped by structural inequalities today. The aim will be to expose the erasures enacted in traditional narratives of travel and imagine alternative histories viewed from a plurality of vantage points. This presentation was delivered at Reimagining Higher Education: journeys of decolonising at De Montfort University, Leicester, on Wednesday 8th November 2023.

1. Workshop session:
Decolonising Travel Studies
Natalya Din-Kariuki & Guido van Meersbergen
University of Warwick
Reimagining Higher Education: Journeys of Decolonising
DeMontfort University, 8 November 2023

2.  Examining the historical development of and
colonial legacies contained in travel and
exploration studies
 Demonstrating how the field’s methodologies
and theoretical paradigms have excluded and
delegitimised certain groups or rendered them
invisible
 Challenging and moving beyond Eurocentric
conceptualisations of travel and travel writing
including discourses of ‘discovery’
 Pluralising the perspectives obtained from the
European record of travel
 Utilising empirical case studies of
underrepresented histories of travel
Decolonising Travel Studies

3. Travel studies and decolonial thought
 ‘scholarship on travel writing stayed stuck looking over the shoulders of traveling
Europeans, thereby reproducing the imperial relations that were under examination’ –
Mary Louise Pratt, Afterword, Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Travel Writing (2018).
 Interrogating the politics of travel studies by bringing the field into dialogue with the new
directions offered by decolonial thought
 Decolonial thought: not a single, unified theory, but a set of interrelated theoretical
positions characterised by a commitment to undoing the dehumanising practices and
logics of colonialism and imagining alternatives to them. See Nelson Maldonado-Torres,
‘Thinking through the Decolonial Turn’ (2011).
 Decolonial thought departs from postcolonial studies in its emphasis on epistemology
 Coloniality establishes hierarchies of knowledge which privilege Western epistemes while
degrading or erasing others, including indigenous knowledges, a process decolonial
thinkers describe as ‘epistemicide’. See Claire Gallien, ‘A Decolonial Turn in the Humanities’
(2020) and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South (2014).

4. • Decentring travellers and centring ‘travellees’
• Forms of indigenous and colonised agency
• The marginalisation or erasure of local actors
• Indigenous intermediaries, including native informants
• Colonial ways of seeing and representing
• New engagements with genre and medium
• Decolonising the museum
• The politics of cartography
• Translation and polyglotism
• ‘Double-voiced’ perspectives
Key themes and ideas

5. The Hakluyt Society and Imperial Britain
• Founded on 15 December 1846
• 331 volumes in Main Series + 47 in Extra
Series published to date
• Named after Richard Hakluyt (1553-1616)
• Principal focus on early modern European
colonial travel and exploration
• Strong links with Royal Geographical Society,
Colonial Office, British Museum

6. Colonial Legacies in the works of the Hakluyt Society
• The Hakluyt Society’s entanglement with British
imperialism has substantially shaped the Society’s
publication record
• The primary source record curated by the Hakluyt
Society has historically legitimised, glorified, or
marginalised particular historical actors and narratives
• Continuing relevance: by creating a familiar canon
available to students, researchers and lay readers, the
Society has helped shape dominant understandings of
travel and exploration

7. "The origin of this superiority is to be ascribed to the
valour of those intrepid men who, towards the end of
the sixteenth century, wrung from Spain the supremacy
on the ocean; it is founded upon the enterprize and
prowess of the maritime discoverers who
distinguished the Elizabethan age, but above all upon
the establishment and extent of the British colonies
[…] In perusing the pages of England's colonial history,
we are struck with the beneficial results which
originated from these enterprizes.”
‘Sir Walter Ralegh, to whom belongs the honour of
being the founder of England's colonial empire.”
- Robert H. Schomburgk (ed.), The Discovery of the Large,
Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana […] by Sir Walter Ralegh
(1848)
Colonialism as Discovery

8. ”the entire history of civilisation presents us with
no event, with the exception perhaps of the art of
printing, so momentous as the discovery of the
western world”
“there is no individual who has rendered himself,
on the score of personal character and conduct,
more illustrious than Christopher Columbus”
“the incalculable advantages which it opened up
to the world at large”
- R.H. Major, Select Letters of Christopher Columbus (2nd
ed. 1870)
Colonialism as Discovery

9. Editing and Exploration
“A thorough geographer, such as Lord Curzon
of Keddleston, when about to explore a
selected tract of country, makes himself
acquainted with all that has previously been
done in the same region; so that the study of
volumes issued by the Hakluyt Society
becomes a necessity to him”.
- Sir Robert Clements Markham (1830-1916),
Presidential Address to Royal Geographical Society, 1905

10. “From traffic with the distant parts of civilized Europe and
Asia [Hakluyt] turned to the great unoccupied lands of the
west and became an apostle of colonization. He made no
prophecy that England would become the greatest colonizing
power in the world, he merely pointed to the lands that were
open, and proclaimed the great opportunity.”
“The ground was cleared, and the foundations had been well
and truly laid by the valiant deeds of our seamen, and by the
enterprise of our explorers and commercial agents. In that
preparation of the ground Hakluyt took a notable part, and
by his book he may be said to have fashioned and trimmed
the foundation stone itself.”
- Albert Gray, An Address on the Occasion of the Tercentenary of the
Death of Richard Hakluyt, 23 November, 1916
Sir Albert Gray (1850-1928)
Hakluyt Society President, 1909-1928
Claiming and Framing Richard Hakluyt
(1553-1616)

11. Dorothy Middleton (1909-1999)
“the day of the ‘Hero as Explorer’ was soon to be over. Clever
modern writers spend much energy on stripping such men as
Livingstone and Scott of their laurels, in questioning their motives
and even impugning their veracity. But we of the Hakluyt Society
are not concerned with such facile iconoclasm.”
- Dorothy Middleton, ‘Travel Literature in the Victorian and Edwardian
Eras’, Hakluyt Society Annual Lecture 1980
Postcolonial Challenges

12. “if current critical appraisal of the Society’s past editions
shows that here and there they tended to smack of
imperial triumphalism and contemporary political
correctness, leading to exaggerated claims of European
cultural impact and achievement overseas […] it is possible
to have confidence in global scholarship and believe that, in
time, the same degree of critical appraisal will eventually
detect that the negative aspects of the historical process
now stressed have also been exaggerated, similarly for
ideological and ‘racist’ advantage.”
- P.E.H. Hair, ‘Foreword: The Hakluyt Society: from Past to Future’
(1996)
Postcolonial Challenges

13. Conclusions
• Hakluyt Society has played a prominent role in shaping
travel studies through creating a recognisable canon
available to students and researchers
• Through its decisions on what kind of materials are
understood as relevant to the study of travel and
exploration, the Society helped define the parameters
of the larger scholarly understanding of these topics
• Works of the Hakluyt Society, like other collections, are
not neutral or apolitical, but a curated selection
reflecting priorities and prejudices
• Need for a redefinition of “travel” which is uncoupled
from notions about geographical novelty, discovery, or
historical interest as judged through a European lens

14. Travel and
knowledge
formation
What role has (colonial) travel
and travel writing played in the
production of disciplinary
knowledge in your own field?
How have (colonial) traditions of
travel and travel writing shaped
your own views of the world?

15. […….]

17. De/colonial travel
How do colonial legacies shape
present-day experiences of
travel, including your own?
What would decolonial (histories of)
travel look like?

20. Thank you!
Natalya Din-Kariuki & Guido van Meersbergen
University of Warwick
Reimagining Higher Education: Journeys of Decolonising
DeMontfort University, 8 November 2023