제국주의 여행 서사 비판과 교육

Critique and Education of Imperialism in Travel Writing: Reading Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation along with Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place

This article reads Mary Louis Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation and Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place as travel writing critiques. Pratt’s book explores how European imperialism and colonialism join forces with the travel writing from seventeenth to nineteenth century. Pratt asserts travel narrative in these periods provided ‘Europeans at home’ with imperial perspectives. By using ideology critique and discourse analysis, Pratt revives ‘mutual gaze’ between the traveler and the native. Pratt also offers the concept of ‘Contact Zone’ where two different cultures, historically and geographically separated in the past, socially meet, collide and fight without making homogeneous perspectives. Her study is important because it focuses on mutual influence between the ‘center’ and ‘periphery’ from a postcolonial perspective. Jamaica Kincaid, an American novelist from Antigua who writes of diaspora also criticizes the imperial ideology in travel narratives in her genre-bending narrative, A Small Place. While Pratt directly counters ‘Imperial eyes’ and ‘Imperial I’, Kincaid reveals how imperialism and its legacy have had negative influence on Antigua’s everyday lives. Regarding an imperialist as a personal tourist, an “anti-tour guide”, Kincaid/narrator guides ‘you’, especially a white North American or European tourist to see what ‘you’ see as well as what ‘you’ do not see in Antigua. I argue that A Small Place is also an imperialist ideology critique like Pratt’s book. Moreover I argue that Antigua is a Contact zone and A Small Place is a narrative in the Contact Zone. Kincaid has created different kind of tourist guide, travel writing, and ideology critique using a different rhetorical strategy and language use.