On the complicated questions around writing about travel

Questions of travel must consider the unequal power relations that characterize present global encounters and how they are enmeshed in the historical processes in the past. Travel was embedded in the colonial exploitation of Empires, and cosmopolitanism—at least the dominant version of it—has always been capitalist-driven. Knowledge about other cultures has been used to validate colonialism, as we have learned from Edward Said, and to create infrastructure for neo-imperialist market expansion. The traveler has been wearing the colonizer’s cloak since Prospero claimed an island and enslaved the “hag seed.” The Tempest exemplifies travel as a narrative of discovery, and Prospero is not the only one who understands that knowledge is power.