[...]سپیده دم چو دم بر زد سپیدی سیاهی خواند حرف ناامیدی
هزاران نرگس از چرخ جهانگرد فرو شد تا بر آمد یک گل زرد

چو شب زلف سیاه افکند بر دوش نهاد از ماه زرین حلقه در گوش

شبا هنگام کز صحرای اندوه رسیدی آفتابش بر سر کوه
سیاهی بر سپیدی نقش بستی علم برخاستی سلطان نشستی

چو شب روی از ولایت در کشیدی سپاه روز رایت بر کشیدی


night in Nezami's Khamse:
فرو زنده شبی روشنتر از روز جهان روشن به مهتاب شب‌افروز
شبی باد مسیحا در دماغش نه آن بادی که بنشاند چراغش
ز تاریکی در آن شب یک نشان بود که آب زندگی دروی نهان بود
سوادی نه بر آن شبگون عماری جز آن عصمت که باشد پرده‌داری
صبا گرد از جبین جان زدوده ستاره صبح را دندان نموده
شبی بود از در مقصود جوئی مراد آن شب ز مادر زاد گوئی
ازین سو زهره در گوهر گسستن وز آن سو مه به مروارید بستن
زمین در مشک پیمودن به خروار هوا در غالیه سودن صدف‌وار
ز مشک افشانی باد طربناک عبیرآمیز گشته نافه خاک
دماغ عالم از باد بهاری هوا را ساخته عود قماری
سماع زهره شب را در گرفته مه یک هفته نصفی بر گرفته
ثریا بر ندیمی خاص گشته عطارد بر افق رقاص گشته
جرس جنبانی مرغان شب‌خیز جرسها بسته در مرغ شب‌آویز
دد و دام از نشاط دانه خویش همه مطرب شده در خانه خویش
اگر چه مختلف آواز بودند همه با ساز شب دمساز بودند

...................................

climate in Nezami:

یکی شب از شب نوروز خوشتر چه شب کز روز عید اندوه کش‌تر
سماع خرگهی در خرگه شاه ندیمی چند موزون طبع و دلخواه

زمستان گشته چون ریحان ازو خوش که ریحان زمستان آمد آتش

...................................

in Shahnameh (night):

چو شب گردش روز پرگار زد  فروزنده را مهره در قار زد

سوی خانه رفتند هر سه چوباد شب آمد بخفتند پیروز و شاد
چو خورشید زد عکس برآسمان پراگند بر لاژورد ارغوان

به شادی درآمد شب دیریاز چو خورشید رخشنده بگشاد راز

شب تیره تا شد بلند آفتاب همی گشت با نوذر افراسیاب

شب تیره تا برکشد روز چاک نیایش کنم پیش یزدان پاک

شب تیره چون روی زنگی سیاه ستاره نه پیدا نه خورشید و ماه
تو خورشید گفتی به بند اندرست ستاره به خم کمند اندرست

ز شبگیر تا تیره شد آفتاب همی خون به جوی اندر آمد چو آب

به روز درخشان شب آمد سیاه چپ و راست لشکر بیاراستند

...................................

in old Farsi:
پرچم = دم گاو بزرگ
خانه = اتاق
هیجان = مستی جنسی (حیوان نر)، جنبش دریا
دانستن to know = توانستن to be able to
خسته شدن getting tired = مجروح شدن getting injured
سرشتن to create = مخلوط کردن to mix, compose
راه بردن = شناختن، بلد بودن
raftan = eshal gerftan
dashtan = motevaghef kardan
afzudan = toghyan kardan



TRAVEL*

-Adam Olearius (ambassador, translator, Russian+Persian)
-Sa'di (poet, traveler, theorist of love and friendship, )
-Sana+Sina (artist, researcher, translator, )

world? what is late today? trans-late: beyond being late --> travel and arriving late
travel, trans, transportation, poetry, disruption in travel, traumatic travel, log,

traumatic travel:
poetic source/act
related to refuging
voyage
exploration

investigate poetry and travel in the 12th century and 16th century and 21st century encounter
translational worlding between German Iranian cross-cultural speculative narratives that we fabulate with artistic and research methodologies

trajectory, destined beings, translations, transportation, routs, paths, maps,
transportation system
translation system
error in destination(?) [ontology of ‘error’ in 12th, 16th, 21st]
mutation in the garden(?)
technological system of destiny -?-> Sa'di
the flow of energy and material : dejle-biaban continuity

which agential force or travel agency Sa'di or Olearius or Sana or Sina is enrolled or registered in, that it sends them off to far distances?

pure political plays?
the question of ambassadorship
ambassadorial activities of Sana and Sina
the question of diplomacy
ambassador: storytelling, acting,
comparative thinking, comparative research, comparative translational methodology : *self in world* tech., lit., dis.,
which technologies (of composing, of writing, of figuring) are installed for Sa'di in the 12th century and for Adam Olearius in the 16th century that allows them to imagine and engage in/with what we call today *mondial*?


(Sa'di + Olearius:)
chance encounter, failures, writing, making figures, loving, making friends, their acts of worlding (?), composing worlds, (de-compose?)
technicity: armillary sphere, Globe of Gottorf, Golestan, drawings, star constellations with astrological and mythological symbols, inside-outside model of the cosmos,
--> they both have concerns of *global consciousness* --> and their differences: two (or more) different world knowledges
GPS: global system position, concern of both Sa'di and Olearius

an excuse to read and investigate their worldings? translations between worlds, and sewing, tearings, and so on during the Safaviten and the Russian Tsar 16th century cosmology and models of reciprocity
(Translation is always interpretive, critical, and partial.)

intersection of multiple hierarchies:
-the Safaviten order (Isfahan architecture)
-the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp order (family architecture, court and mathematic)
-Tsar order (urban)
-literature of reciprocity***

Sana keywords: distortion, displacement, distance, alternation, collage, blur (noun), noise, voice-over, subtle changes, micro-macro, micro-politic, rhythm, turbulence, fragmentation, metaphor, persistence, repetition, disturbance,
(unexpected)

--> separation ??? =/=? compose

media/mediums: new narratives (script, score, etc.), image archive, garden (material and semiotic site), performance poetry, land-art, video

why video: using performative materials, enactments and staging of speculative narratives, experimental film making, editing, cheap visual effects, animation and drawing. by using the local geography and landscape of Eckernförde, employment of fragmented scores and modest embodiment, experimental acting and storytelling, the video as a generous medium holds and hosts all our gathered materials, and enables a linear but expansive experience. we will write short scripts based on stories from Olearius's travel logs in Iran and Sa'di's Golestan in order to put them into tests after 8 and 3 centuries, and produce intensity and curiosity for a richer way of relating to our shared cultural heritages and literacies.

practical: we will explore all the mentioned ideas and storylines as starting points to create interest for material-discursive practices of ‘worlding’ and ‘encountering’ in cross-techno-cultural intersections.

...................................

[working] title:
Das Gesicht des Paradies
the cast of one Globe to another
Globe of Gottorf of Golestan
“Each serving diligently in its own appointed place”
“Deliverance from the yoke of bondage”
The Globe of Gottorf and deliverance from the yoke of bondage
The cast of Golestan and the magnitude prison of Globe



Das Gesicht des Paradies und schlichtendes Gottorfer Riesenglobus
Adam Olearius and Sa'di in bondage

magnetic fields of

intermediate category
contiguous mass of flowers and tulips
magnitude prison
Others adopt Hell
...instead you are in paradise


traveling
post travel

Paradise Roads

Gesicht
Globe of Gottorf and Golestan of Sa'di


foreign affairs

...................................

Planthroposcene, the age of gardens

...................................

[...] remembering is not a replay of a string of moments, but an enlivening and reconfiguring of past and future that is larger than any individual. [...] The past is never finished. It cannot be wrapped up like a package, or a scrapbook, or an acknowledgment; we never leave it and it never leaves us behind.

Barad's mother's question: “what good is there in offering recognition that can't be recognized?”

[...] there is only the ongoing practice of being open and *alive to each(other)* meeting

“How to disrupt patterns of thinking that see the past as finished and the future as not ours or only ours?”

...................................

When we read or hear any language statement from the past, we translate.

...................................

the ways Olearius remains non-Iranian all the way

...................................

Conley's notion of “Haptic Eye” (in line with Marks)

dilate the way (here?), we can't elsewhere

the lines that Olearius draws have their origin in their process, in the line, and in the support that line receives,
the drawing that causes the line

the hand that sees
a hand that perceives

the reciprocity between seeing and drawing is that which metabolizes Olearius --(the interchangeability of the visual and verbal)--> “simultaneous process of subjectivation and objectivation” (of sensation)

study of the Persian object

gradually discovering what is in the image
to the image
(already knowing what it is)
how the screen/surface inflicting things far and near

(an) art of viewing

how the eye and the object of my vision constitute each other

optical visuality

erotically charged moment
--> the distanced is sensed


*world laid bare
lay: to place down in a position of rest, or in a horizontal position
bare: naked, open


a political aesthetic: a seeing hand relates to prehension (Greifen) of the world at large, the world at its imagined totality, *a world in which any ocular grasp is utopian* (and is always politically invested)


celestial sphere
|
terrestrial sphere
|
the insular eye

...................................

[a map] it tells a story, an itinerary [...] it whets the imagination. It propels narrative but also, dividing our attention, prompts reverie and causes our eyes to look both inward, at our own geographies, and outward, to rove about the frame and to engage, however we wish, the space[...]


(طرز بیان tarz-e bayan) idiolect of the geographer and cartographer

is composed of signs that do not transcribe speech. Riddled with speech and writing

a “map” that plots and colonizes the imagination of the public it is said to “invent” and, as a result, to seek to control.

an image that locates and patterns the imagination of its spectators

When it takes hold, [a map] encourages its public to think of the world in concert with its own articulation of space.

(the advent of bird-eye-view culture)

A map underlines what a film [or text] is and what it does, but it also opens a rift or brings into view a site where a critical and productively interpretive relation with the film [or text] can begin.

*locational imaging*

As the person who gazes upon a map works through a welter of impressions about the geographical information it puts forward—along with his or her own fantasies and pieces of past or anticipated memory in dialogue with the names, places, and forms on the map[...]

(Olearius drawings and frontispieces) establishes a geography, manufactured from cartographic elements

When a geography is given a sense of identification, of difference, doubt, a discerning gaze, or a critical reverie [the people, animals, subjects in the map cannot see how they are being mapped]


(how certain places are made to become the) simulacra of others*

perspective, visual style, narrative economy, scale, [...], the stakes of mimesis, and reception


story about the demise of nation and its cartographer:
(Dreamtigers by J. L. Borges)
In my childhood I was a fervent worshiper of the tiger: not the jaguar, the spotted “tiger” of the Amazonian tangles and the isles of vegetation that float down the Paraná, but that striped, Asiatic, royal tiger, that can only be faced by a man of war, on a castle atop an elephant. I used to linger endlessly before one of the cages at the zoo; I judged vast encyclopedias and books of natural history by the splendor of their tigers. (I still remember those illustrations: I who cannot rightly recall the brow or the smile of a woman.) Childhood passed away, and the tigers and my passion for them grew old, but still they are in my dreams. At that submerged or chaotic level they keep prevailing. And so, as I sleep, some dream beguiles me, and suddenly I know I am dreaming. Then I think: this is a dream, a pure diversion of my will; and now that I have unlimited power, I am going to cause a tiger.
Oh, incompetence! Never can my dreams engender the wild beast I long for. The tiger indeed appears, but stuffed or flimsy, or with impure variations of shape, or of an implausible size, or all too fleeting, or with a touch of the dog or the bird.

****
The one that is in the other forever betrays its differences with respect to its surrounding milieu in the field of the frame.


cartography at the time of its emergence in early modern print-culture [...] maps were tipped into books to call attention to the aspect and format of a medium for which seeing and reading were of a same character.


toward productive, critical, and even creative speculation


a map in a movie begs and baits us to ponder the fact that who we are or whomever we believe ourselves to be depends, whether or not our locus is fixed or moving, on often unconscious perceptions about where we come from and may be going.

To be able to say who one is depends on believing in the illusion that consciousness is in accord with where it is felt in respect at once to itself and to its milieus.***

maps ==> that we are naturally in the world

ontology is a function of geography

*** Figures in a topographic field are as they are because geography is destiny ***

(can be defined in a narrow sense) Identity: the consciousness of belonging (or longing to belong) to a place and of being at a distance from it.


map:
•a guarantee for “taking place”
•a sign of prevarication (a map is inserted both to establish a fallacious authenticity of a place and to invent new or other spaces)


We find ourselves immediately undone by the weightless fact that we have no reason to be where we are.


rhetoric of invisibility

maps are of a spatial scale

the history of cartography is marked by the appropriation, control, and administration of power (as David Buisseret [1992], Michel Foucault [1975 and 1994 (1967)], J. Brian Harley [1988 and 2001], Denis Wood [1992], and others have shown)

symbolic and political effectiveness of cartographic diagrams

(to leave open) the art of living with space itself

what it means to be located and discerned in the world


they lead the viewer “all over the map”


regime of the “image-fact” --> implicit cartography
an abstract point of view on reality that is analyzed

Conley > Bazin is close in spirit to the first sentence of Ptolemy's Geography in which cosmography is likened to the construction of a world map in the way a painter executes the portrait of the sitter, while topography is seen as a local view (of a city) in the way that the same painter depicts an isolated or detached piece, such as an eye or an ear.



(my deep interest:) spatial histories that procede us

Renaissance
*art: various and always mobile articulation of space
*writings: spatially conceived and materially determined --> they explore surfaces and volumes
*cartography: component of the literary imagination of the early modern age

{narratives of the Renaissance tell of the construction of the subject through a venture--a plotted itinerary--into the realm of death and back again} (# Adventure Time)

construction of space in disciplines that pertain to geometry*
treating writing as a function of extension [according to Conley, Self-Made Map]
writing holds, penetrates, delineates, and explores space; it maps itself in relation to an autonomous signature--born of the congress of space

early modern: a growth of a composite writing that moves between diagrammatical and discursive inspiration ~=> creation of self

(i have a relation with ajayeb, or any ‘old’ text, in that of “the pleasure these works afford is due the ways that they allow us to invent imaginary realms of space through our illusion of having ‘first-hand’ contact with them” -->? creation of my “self”)
in a world in which we discover our heritage as gratuitous beings --> a partial and universal history of ourselves
we are products of individual and collective histories

geographic literature


the sudden birth and growth of mapping (between 15th and 17th century):
•in Renaissance admiration for antiquity Ptolemy esteemed as the world's founding geographer
•in growth of scientific revolution quantification and measurement was stressed, the human body and the geographic landscape of the natural world became topics of interest
•plotting and perspective: in representation art a “saturated reality” began to animate paintings + the invention of artificial perspective ==> new ways of gridding and plotting the world
•political unification, or nation building, to use maps to construct systems of defense
•*emerging self and to the self's relation to the idea of national space

new modes of surveying and plotting the world influence representation of the private and public domains of the individual writer

theatricalization of the self --> a consciousness of its autonomy (through modes of positioning [in gridded and textual reality])
--> a new cartographic impulse:
•changing conditions of information
•new taxonomies
•new relations that individuals hold with space
•emerging sense of national identity

the self would acquire its identity through the creation of a space that bears the presence (or the reminder) of the mapping of its signature
its “foundational fantasy” depends on (an alliance with) a strongly marked geographic consciousness

mimes the construction (of a world)

contemporary politics of statecraft

...to locate a mobile site of anguish to project the portrait (of epic and lyrical scope) of a national subject?
...between experience and fantasy for the sake of producing imaginary conquests in the shape of self-aggrandizement?

ingenieur du moi
medium engineers


imaginary space, nation, selfhood

*** the self-possessed individual ***

(Conley calls) writing “cartographic” insofar as tensions of space and of figuration inhere in fields of printed discourse
(although his understanding of writing as ‘effects of recorded speech’ is not interesting)
(and he ties to fast cartography to expansion and conquest, allegorical propaganda of cartographer's presence)


living conditions of vocal exchange


visible coordinates that enclose, frame, quantify

a process of discovery --that--> maps its movement as it goes
-making a fetish of progress and accuracy
-vital, narcissistic illusion that the world begins with our birth and expands through our perception of it


isolario: illustrating the islands of the world, a genre


“national” subjects attached to the geographies that they are both mapping and describing
graphic construction of the self
Olearius's globe of Gottorf (=/= Morton's hyperobject): the effect of totality, of having engineered a world through its own labors. [Ptolemaic-Aristotlian machinery of the spheres, which hold the fixed stars in place, stars in a trace on the relatively stable horizon of earth and sky (in which meteor deviation from this harmonious arrangement or celestial machinery was considered disastrous)]
**self become autonomous <== fixed to an illusion of a geographic truth, it can be detached from the coordinates that mark its point of view, its history, its formation, and the aesthetics (and politics) of its signature. [and with Sana, through Sa'di, we start with this position, rehearsing criticism studies in terms of the birth of the subject and of subjectivity in early modern Europe]


terrae incognitae: the unknown, graphically inscribed, and to be conquered

“nomination is a mode of symbolic appropriation that furnishes virgin territories with a memory, with a gridding that dispossesses space of its alterity and that makes of it an object of discovery subjected to the constraints of linguistic reference, that intends that at every identifiable site there correspond a name” (Conley > Christian Jacob > Mallarme)

lodged in the corporal space of an image of “man”

spectral presence of death

navel: construed to be a site where the relation of the unknown has its first noticeable, physical trace, [...] the site of a ruptured attachment
-as an embodiment of the relation to the unknown
-the subject desires to give birth to himself or herself

artificial self-birthing and self-monumentalization

--> creation of a universe of wise (hakimane حکیمانه)


it is so strange in Olearius: the process of detachment that constitutes every subject's psychogenesis inspires a geographic desire (to retrace one's tenuous “roots,” which are woven through the visible register of language, the audible areas of images...) -- with Conley

Olearius's being: at one with the local, national, global, and cosmic space in which he or she visualizes an origin associated with a site of birth --> womb: the reassuring rectitude of the map, which is both a material and paternal image of seemingly timeless symbolic order


tensions between the visible and the invisible
(what is taken to be evident or “visible” meets what remains invisible or outside of language; #amazon project)
to grid the relation of the visible and the invisible (in cartography and writing)
their certain mobility of flux and indeterminacy (in Descartes becomes a subliminal practice)
the ideological dimensions of known and unknown become crystallized
*the viewer is urged to look at things transversally [=/= tangency: having contact at a single point or along a line without crossing] --> reader invents the process of subjectivity when analyzing the differential patterns that are working in the cartographic document
--> *double bind: of cosmic and local space, of viewer included and excluded from the discourse, of weakened deixis [deictic, words or expressions that rely absolutely on context] (or dialogue) ---> mobilizes subjectivity


quasi-spatial conquest (through the extension of the delimited field of the known in the channel of a ‘polar relation with the unknown,’ according to mappings that envisage the progression of a deferred knowledge) [Conley > Rosolato --> technologies that construct early modern space (--also with Olearius)]


...to produce a great geography of introspection

cosmic and affective space


illusion of a universe of infinite curvature

*the impossible “point of view” given to the observer of early world maps*



map =/=? mystical narrative --?--> depends on an itinerary through space and language

mysticism
only adjectival forms of the term had occurred (in Renaissance and before), suggesting that the nonsubstantive status of mystical activities made them more ‘real’ than we might believe ** (de Certeau)
the development of atlas-structures and of two-dimensional --> attenuation (taz'if تضعيف) of the mixture of scientific and mystical dimensions
incunabulum --> Cartesian method
from a half-named sense of the unknown --to--> a clearly articulated relation with the unknown****


[*]perspectival object: the positioning and mapping of the self in and about the world in its ongoing construction of psychogenesis + aesthetics + history of perspective + clinical practice*--> a series of junctures between a viewer and what he or she sees, projects, fantasizes, and remembers
--> body's location in the world ***


excess of mastery
absolute quest of power

*to make meaning enigmatic(?)

with Sana, we are engaged in an anti-globe making, a transitional object rather than a ‘glory globe,’ “a field of diagonical or interdiscursive ‘play’ between impressions and memories”
in our exhibition, we are working the gridded/allegorized cartographic discourse/consciousness through appeal to spatial rhetoric
(reworking) the new form of a self-produced “geography” of writing (emerging in 16th century)
-we are perhaps inclined with the figure of Rhizome (from Deleuze and Guattari), the unifying lines and connections that produce an image of...
[in a fairly common obsession, amateurs of maps ofen seek to find the names of the places where they were born or raised. but when Sana's father wanted to erase his name from the map Sana made with his itineraries we betrayed this originary site]
-schizoanalytic cartographies, Guattari on: conditions of enunciation, structures of individual and collective subjectivity)
-we say (in our work with Olearius): reading can be an actively vagrant, nomadic examination of ideological materials


...an attempt to create in an ever recurring, mobile, and modular structures that endow themselves with renewed form


*the cartographic project invents a relation with the past

[*]projective identification: an illusion that tells who, where, and what these maps are about, and specifies the power that they wish to appropriate in diplomatic (and military) areas

[*]perspectival object: is the concept that shifts the spectator from a passive role to that of an engaged traveler who moves through the time and space of a given body of words, images, and sensation --passage-into--> vital and marginal areas where imagination, fact, history, and self are combined


plastic and lexical attributes

confused pictorial and lexical properties

[*]pictogram: alphabetical shapes + bodily form + memory of a seemingly archaic past of confusion and violence + +
pictogram is mobile, it moves between one register of cognition and another, it resembles the rebus [word puzzle representing form of pictures or symbols; (Latin: “by things”) a kind of word puzzle which uses pictures to represent words or parts of words, for example H + picture of ear = Hear] and calligram [a poem with (a phrase or single word) in which the typeface or handwriting is important], it conflates language and image and is thus liable to move in many unpredictable directions**** (@Luiza, Sina)
pictogram mobilizes wit[--animates--> imaginary & real movement] and laughter <== “short circuiting of rational thinking” (Bastide) }--> for the construction of a psychogeography
-a pictogram attached to the place that it both represents and remotivates --> *old maps are preoccupied with information at the specific point where it can be written, only at the very site of its pertinence* (Jacob)


fragments of remembered writing


the labor of interpretation consists exactly in opening onto surprise [...] immediate rediscovery of the known (... Mijolla-Mellor) ♥


*
ideograms, mimetic figures, miming the objects
that disrupts and affirms the sate of things
a stenographic form that telescopes language and extends into space as it signals a point where memory and national identity are being schematized

a childhood experience

the subject uses the illusion of a given spatial and historical order to create an imaginary world of impressions that tie his or her body to a mobility of space and place



signature, affixed to the edges in the spandrels between a map and its borders, is both ungrounded and necessary

authenticating effect
a sense of self-distance and power are obtained in the enactment of a signature

Conley argues that: the individual who comes to be named as such can only do so when he or she gains the required illusion of having a real place in the world or, failing that, of experiencing movement in space and language that redeems the labor of living


cartography
•compass for verbal plotting
•turning the reader's gaze toward a productive consideration of its visible form


--*-- the dialogue and its dialogic echoes --*--


statecraft: fortification, centralization, extensive rebuilding (of national borders)
(Iran, Germany, Princess Bubblegum from Adventure Times)
--> (perspectival signature) existential relation with space
-Princess Bubblegum naturalized story: total control of now alienated bodies in a machine-determined future; (her jokingly horrible) mission to promote scientific management of every phase of society;
Princess Bubblegum = rational management in advanced monopoly capitalism


the cartographers create a “cultural entity” that, it is claimed, is only represented in the maps [...] also brought into being ... the authority that underwrote their own discourse ==> they make themselves

[*]colonialization is based on a culture's perceived need to acquire a protective zone between itself and the world in order to gain authority
(also) “it becomes increasingly difficult to find a stable signified to which the whole thesaurus of exotic signifiers may be referred” [Greenblatt]


topophilia


(i have been trying to reverse the movement of) transition from cosmography to topography

cartographic truth --> silent agenda (--> power structures)


motivation and demotivation of proper names and their implied referents

...................................

Allegories of the Continent

Persianisch, Persiae,

...................................

[Mary Louis Pratt]

“Our” Dr. Livingstone was a grand nephew of the “real” Dr. Livingstone in Africa. English Canada was still colonial in the 1950s: reality and history were somewhere else, embodied in British men.

The syllables wound through our lives, threading together by force of repetition things that were distant, discontinuous and unreal. Living stone. This is how empire makes the world meaningful to its subjects, how it weaves itself into the everyday.

...empire made us part of a history that was somewhere else made by people who were not us. At the same time, when it came to Africa, we knew who we were. Sunday school missionary stories built the color line into our imaginations. That was part of their job, to create us as subjects of empire, give us our place in the order.

The book aims to be both a study in genre and a critique of ideology. Its predominant theme is how travel books written by Europeans about non-European parts of the world created the imperial order for Europeans “at home” and gave them their place in it.  I ask how travel writing made imperial expansion meaningful and desirable to the citizenries of the imperial countries, even though the material benefits of empire accrued mainly to the few. Travel books, I argue, gave European reading publics a sense of ownership, entitlement and familiarity with respect to the distant parts of the world that were being explored, invaded, invested in, and colonized. Travel books were very popular. They created a sense of curiosity, excitement, adventure, and even moral fervor about European expansionism. They were, I argue, one of the key instruments that made people “at home” in Europe feel part of a planetary project; a key instrument, in other words, in creating the “domestic subject” of empire.

the rise of natural history

These case studies are shaped by a number of shared questions. With what codes has travel and exploration writing produced “the rest of the world” for European readerships at particular points in Europe’s expansionist process?
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