As Holtz and Masse (2012) argued, scholarly attention to travel literature gathered momentum in the 1970s. The dismantling of the colonial empires transformed colonial history and ideology into central objects of inquiry, revealing affinities between anticolonial critique – from Fanon and Césaire to Memmi – and critical approaches to travel writing. This renewed scholarly attention expanded the corpus beyond canonical European travelogues to include Ancien Régime texts, missionary accounts, relations from New France, and texts long dismissed as merely documentary. Scholars such as Lestringant, Yerasimos and Turbet-Delof revisited early modern travel writing for its literary qualities, while in the Francophone world, bibliographies, editions, and archival recovery helped transform forgotten travel accounts into legitimate literary objects.
However, this rehabilitation has also raised definitional questions. Often described as relation de voyage, littérature viatique, or discours de découverte, the récit de voyage has long been understood as an open and unstable genre that draws on multiple discursive forms. Building on this generic flexibility, the panel expands the corpus of travel writing to include legal documents, missionary accounts, ethnographic narratives, and diasporic fiction. Although diverse in form, all the texts considered belong to the field of travel writing and reshape the genre according to specific literary, historical, and ideological concerns.
In particular, the papers examine representations of alterity across periods and geographic regions, tracing how travel narratives evolved from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century while preserving enduring formal and ideological structures. In the seventeenth century, travel writing emerged as an influential genre shaped by European expansion and by the impulse to name, classify, and control the non-European world. Travel accounts, therefore, contributed to constructing the non-European “Other” as an object of textual and visual scrutiny.
Within this framework, Daniel Guerrero’s “‘Cette fâcheuse condition’, ou la construction de l’esclave noir dans les Antilles françaises au XVIIème siècle” examines the construction of the Black slave in the seventeenth century French Caribbean, focusing on how law and religion were mobilized within the French civilizing mission to legitimize the colonial project. Drawing on legal and ethnographic-scientific texts, the paper traces the production and consolidation of racialized representations within colonial discourse.
Shifting to Madagascar, Sandrine F. Rajaonarivony’s “A ‘True Earthly Paradise’: Madagascar From Travel Journals to DreamWorks” traces the island’s representation from early travel journals and missionary texts to later military writings and fictional ethnographies. It foregrounds racialization, sexualization, and the construction of the land as a space of projection and exploitation, while examining how these patterns evolve in contemporary multimedia forms.
While both exemplify key features of seventeenth century travel writing, the final two papers show their consolidation and reconfiguration in the nineteenth century.
Abigail Blair’s “Rethinking Loti’s Travel Narrative & the Realities of 19th Century French Polynesian Society through Le Mariage de Loti” examines Loti’s semi-autobiographical narrative as an example of exoticizing discourse. By questioning Loti’s historical reliability, it explores how representations of indigenous populations are intertwined with colonial practices, particularly through the role of “illegal” marriages in facilitating land expropriation and reinforcing narratives of alterity within the framework of French expansion in the South Pacific.
In “Narrating the Oriental Other: Gendered Ethnographic Encounters in Nineteenth-Century French Travel Writing,” Dr. Irini Apostolou examines late nineteenth-century travel accounts by French women travelers, focusing on how encounters with local populations are transformed into gendered ethnographic narratives that mediate cultural difference for European readers.
The session will consist of thirteen-minute papers, followed by fifteen minutes of discussion. Because the papers are closely connected, the discussion period will be essential for drawing out shared concerns and productive differences.
This selection brings together diverse voices across periods, locations, and textual forms, spanning the Caribbean, Madagascar, French Polynesia, and the Ottoman world from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. It also foregrounds colonial, gendered, legal, ethnographic, and literary perspectives, enriching the conversation on the récit de voyage and its Francophone reconfigurations.