No more Twain? -- Northwest Nerds Bookclub

[ Show ]

Support VoyForums

[ Shrink ]

VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 15:13:46 06/06/00 Tue
Author: David
Subject: No more Twain?
In reply to: Sarah 's message, "I'm back" on 20:43:04 06/05/00 Mon

So, is everyone who actually read Twain through with it? Anything more to add? Court, didn't you pick it?

I skimmed it in the few weeks that I was home, and I do not have it with me here in Madrid to quote, so I don't have a very detailed response. I see where Chris and Marl are coming from--Twain's contradicted in the way that he identifies elements of �civilization� among the Other People he visits as he mocks their �barbaric� habits. The best way that I can make sense of this is that he's just as conflicted about his fellow North Americans. The irony we've been talking about comes in very handy when he subtly hints that �we� are just as barbaric as �they� are. That's really the only way that I can plug in this writing to his later activism as an anti-imperialist.
But I think the book makes for especially good reading today, when so many people hail globalization and the interconnectedness of people around the world. This kind of a worldview uncritically paints a rosy picture that assumes that the power relations within those interactions are always equal. It's clear reading Twain (and other travel writers from the nineteenth century) that they never have been. Lots of �post-colonial� scholars today are pretty uniformly critical of Twain and his cohorts who actually bolstered U.S. (and European) imperialism through their travel writings: they use ideas about linguistic colonization and the imperial �gaze,� or worldview, that worked quite well with more aggressive and political efforts to exploit the lands and peoples visited (many readers in Twain's day may not have picked up the irony of civilization/barbarism that I raised above). It's something I have to think about a lot, because in a sense I'm doing the same thing. At the same time, I still think it's possible to travel and write about other cultures without necessarily �colonizing� them. What do you guys think? Does writing like this challenge or uphold ideas of racial/national superiority that have historically underwritten colonizing ventures?
Just a thought. When does everyone want to start the next book?

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Replies:

Re: No more Twain? -- Marla, 09:50:13 06/08/00 Thu