Travel Narratives in Dialogue

Book excerpt: Travel Narratives in Dialogue examines nineteenth-century imperialist travelogues written about Peru and examines Peruvian writers of the same period who fashioned their own travelogues as protests against how imperialist writers denigrated Peru and Peruvian culture. This study exposes the dialogic nature of travelogues in the Bakhtinean sense and underscores how the travel-writing subjects produce texts that serve as fora of struggle, coercion, control, and contestation depending on the personal, imperialist, nationalist, and proto-feminist agendas the writers supported. Travel narratives examined include those written by J. J. von Tschudi, Madeline Vinton Dahlgren, Flora Tristan, Juan Bustamante, Manuel A. Fuentes, and José Manuel Valdéz y Palacios.