Spektrum Iran

Travel Writing on Iran: Counter-Orientalism in Ella Maillart's The Cruel Way

Document Type : Original Research Paper

Authors

Ahmad Gholi 1
Seyed Mohammad Marandi 2
Zeinab Ghasemi Tari 3

1 PhD Student, English Department. Faculty of Foreign Languages ​​and Literatures, University of Tehran, Iran.

2 The Professor, English Department. Faculty of Foreign Languages ​​and Literatures, University of Tehran, Iran (corresponding author),

3 The Assistant Professor, Faculty of World Studies, University of Tehran, Iran.

Abstract
Travel writing becomes an academic object of inquiry in the wake of Edward Said’s Orientalismin which he states travelogues are not the mirror-like pictures of Eastern terrains, but texts that are affiliated with Orientalism written to promote Western Imperialism. Nevertheless, travel scholars like Behdad and Blanton take issue with him, positing that travel writers can transcend rigid strictures of Orientalism. Hence, by invoking the perspectives of Behdad and Blanton, the current study embarks on reading Ella Maillart’s The Cruel Way to throw light on her counter-Orientalism: the moments in which she poses a challenge to Orientalist rhetoric. Accordingly, it argues that she displays her counter-Orientalism in two ways: firstly, through desiring of and engaging fruitfully with holy spaces; secondly via sympathizing and identifying with her local travellees oppressed by Reza Shah’s modernization project. Since Iran has remained unexplored in the studies of her travel book, this study delimits its scope mainly to Iran and partially to Afghanistan.


Keywords

Counter-orientalism
Desire
Holy Spaces
Sympathy
Identification
Modernization

Subjects

Spektrum Iran
Volume 35, Issue 1
April 2022
Pages 31-54

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