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The Quest for Self: Travel and Geopolitics in Our World
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18959 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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2 / 1991 |
5,313 Words |
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Ihab Hassan
Ihab Hassan is Vilas Research Professor of English and
comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin in
Milwaukee. He is the author of Selves at Risk: Patterns of
Quest in Contemporary American Letters and Out of Egypt:
Scenes and Arguments of an Autobiography. In the sixties and
seventies he developed the theory of postmodernism in essays
collected in The Post-modern Turn: Essays in Post-modern
Theory and Culture. |
Travel--tourism, adventure, quest--is rife in our world. From jungles, across oceans, steppes, and savannah, saharas, from Macchu Picchu to Kathmandu, plunging in the Mariana Trench or scaling Everest, crisscrossing the white wastes of the Arctic or Antarctic, leaving their traces, their refuse, everywhere, men--and increasingly women--move through earth's spaces, seeking something they may or may not know. For travel is rarely mere physical displacement; it is gravid with metaphor. Though acutely personal, it engages global issues, and enacts crucial encounters with both the self and the other--that alien out there or within us all.
This essay explores one aspect of travel: its present geopolitical space. Other writers have elaborated rich metaphors of that space. Here I can consider only the general scene of travel as it reflects on our postcolonial age, offering, toward the end, a single example from the work of Paul Theroux, forever peregrine.
An Interactive World
We live in a time of planetization, globalization--and of retribalization, splinters of empires, each sect or tribe seeking new autonomy. We live also in a time of dazzling realignments, a world ambiguously and sometimes terribly interactive. In the last year alone, thanks to the emanations of glasnost, our world has permanently changed. America has "won"--let us say it, despite inevitable simplifications--won the Cold War, and can look now to new allies and perhaps new rivals. Such realignments presage not the "end of history" but new nimbleness in situating our relationships in the world.
But current realignments--deals and whispers in the geopolitical dusk--are themselves evidence of an older process. The planetization of the earth may have begun with neolithic hunters, or perhaps with the first outcast who mated elsewhere. But with Columbus, Cabot, Magellan, da Gama, and Drake the earth became interactive in another way. This was both an exuberant and bellicose moment for the West, grievous for other people who gradually fell prey to colonization, excepting some, like the Japanese, so remote and intractable as to stay free. Later, industrialization in the West made its power and knowledge paramount. By the middle of our century, Heidegger could lament "the complete Europeanization [he did not say Americanization] of the earth and of man," an infection, he claimed, that "attacks at the source everything that is of an essential nature."
But Heidegger proved
...
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