(Not) Within Walking Distance: Walking Journeys and the Postcolonial

Abstract

This chapter examines the role of long-distance walking in three contemporary travelogues within the contexts of travel, colonialism and world literature. The protagonists in Tracks: A Woman’s Solo Trek Across 1,700 Miles of Australian Outback by the Australian author Robyn Davidson as well as in Berlin – Moskau: Eine Reise zu Fuss by the German journalist Wolfgang Büscher, and in Atlas eines ängstlichen Mannes by the acclaimed Austrian author Christoph Ransmayr undertake long, strenuous walks leaving the metropolitan center for the periphery. Yet, this shared trajectory from the mainstream to the margin leads to very different insights. Davidson’s months-long solo walk undertaken to shed personal burdens and gain a better understanding of Aboriginal culture motivates the author to reject Western binary discourse. Ransmayr’s walks in remote places across the globe affirm an ethnocentric self. Büscher walked from Berlin to Moscow following in the footsteps of his grandfather, who died in World War II, in order to apprehend both past and current history. While he recognizes that the quest for comprehensive knowledge is futile, he does not abandon a colonial gaze. In essence, the three accounts show how travel literature both participates in and contests material and representational practices of the (post) colonial world order.