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1. The research behind this essay was conducted at the Centre for Caribbean Studies of the University of Warwick. Support from the University of Santiago de Compostela for this visit is gratefully acknowledged. ATLANTIS 25.1 (June 2003): 51-62 ISSN 0210-6124 Travel Writing and Postcoloniality: Caryl Phillipss The Atlantic Sound María Lourdes López Ropero Universidad de Alicante [email protected] The postcolonial travelogue is one of travel writings most prolific and innovative offsprings in the late-twentieth century. This paper examines the way this subgenre encapsulates the new developments that distinguish contemporary travel accounts from their Enlightened and Victorian counterparts. The socio-political changes brought about by the new century have dramatically altered the motivation and subject matter of a genre that has traditionally been involved in European expansionism and the construction of Europes Other. Once vehicles for cultural prejudice serving official purposes, contemporary travel accounts have become powerful instruments of cultural critique, displaying a greater subject-orientation. My analysis will revolve around Caryl Phillipss second and latest travelogue, The Atlantic Sound (2000), with references to The European Tribe (1987), his first venture into the genre, and to his fiction. This paper also aims at directing critical attention towards Caryl Phillipss travel writing, which as yet has failed to generate as much scholarship as his fiction. I This paper approaches Caryl Phillipss latest travel book, The Atlantic Sound (2000), as a postcolonial travelogue. 1 My contention is that the postcolonial travelogue epitomizes the new developments that have taken place within travel writing from its eighteenth and nineteenth century representations until the late twentieth century. No longer an instrument of imperial expansion, travel writing has become a powerful vehicle of cultural critique, particularly in the hands of special-interest groups such as postcolonial authors. In addition, contemporary travel writers are more subject-oriented, their need to travel and record their experiences often stemming from a personal urge to solve some inner conflict. In his new travelogue, this prolific novelist, essayist and playwright visits three cities involved in the ill-famed Atlantic slave trade. The venture depicted in The Atlantic Sound, however, is not only a revisionist excavation of Europes heavy entanglement in the trade; but, more importantly, an exploration of the elusive notions of home and cultural identity troubled by the complex background of its author as a Caribbean-born, English-raised individual currently based in the U. S. Section 2 of this article charts contemporary travel

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