Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women's Travel Writing and Colonialism

This book provides a useful entry into the field of travel writing from a feminist perspective which combines Foucault with postcolonialist theory. The point of departure are the narratives produced by British women who, during the mid nineteenth to early twentieth century, traveled to colonized countries. Mills locates their narratives within larger structures of both material and symbolic power to stress the importance of the articulations of travel, gender and sexuality within travel culture: women paid attention to different things than men and had different expectations of themselves and of the `natives' while abroad. Much of this is familiar ground, but it is interesting to see how the author takes well-known female accounts such as Mary Kingsley's and reads them not as eccentric products but as part of a broader discourse about gender, colonialism, and travel experience.