On the Limits of Microtravel and Microspection

Travel writing is a literary form that seems to have undergone regular reinvention. This is in part because it is a genre that has always foretold the loss of diversity whilst constantly recalibrating – through the identification and practice of phenomena such as microtravel – the ways in which we (re)experience and (re)define elsewhere. However enabling of new approaches microtravel may prove to be, proposing any understanding of the genre through its lens requires nevertheless certain caveats, relating not least to the ethics of privileging or metaphorizing confinement and restriction. Various modes of what Jean-Didier Urbain understands as positively ‘claustrophilic’ microtravel are, for instance, to be attenuated as they are nothing new to those rendered physically immobile by disability, incarceration or other forms of geographical limitation. We also need to acknowledge similar limitations in the romanticization of walking, a form of locomotion whose praise tends to be in direct proportion to the range of mechanical alternatives available – and may also betoken an obfuscation of privilege and a nostalgia for earlier modes of journeying. Just as deceleration can undeniably trigger heightened sensory awareness of the multiple textures of place, microtravel itself is often also to be associated with an attention to detail otherwise missed from mechanized journeys or denied to those reliant on the acceleration of the body through space. This can entail looking more closely, in processes dubbed ‘microspection’, but, in a further caveat, there is a clear need to be cautious about the potential ocularcentrism of that cognate term. As Mary Louise Pratt demonstrated in Imperial Eyes, the privileging of the gaze can operate as a form of colonial power. Asserting the right to look – panoramically or unimpeded – may preface an assumed right to appropriate and control. Also, this emphasis on the gaze implies a downgrading of other senses, according to a Western sensory hierarchy that has traditionally situated sight above hearing, touch, taste and smell. A challenge to the Eurocentrism of such assumptions is particularly apparent in a context of growing decolonization of the senses. Boaventura de Sousa Santos outlines in The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South, for instance, modes of deep seeing, deep listening and deep tasting common outside Western cultures.