This session focuses on the relationship between Victorian travel writing and cultural memory. Not merely recirculated narratives about the foreign, cultural memory is created through a combination of history, travel guides, visual images, literary texts, and eye-witness accounts—the words and experiences that consolidated expectations about what individuals would encounter on venturing abroad. We contend that cultural memory is both powerfully pervasive and malleable, as new voices contribute to the collective impressions that circulate about given places or peoples.

Scholarship on Victorian travelers tends to focus on the problems of encountering the other, as Edward Said’s ideas consistently underpin the theoretical frameworks for reading travel writing produced in a colonial moment. This panel utilizes an innovative hybrid format to assemble a series of examples that demonstrate that the powerful monoliths of “self” and “other,” which often lie at the heart of Victorian travel scholarship, are not necessarily the primary consequence of travel writing. Taken together, these papers imply that the multiplicity of voices building cultural memory about specific places resonates in a temporal dimension: consolidated cultural memory may be less about “us” versus “them” and more about questions of past versus present versus future.

To theorize the afterlives of what we often think of as stable cultural memories, this panel juxtaposes examples from a wide spectrum of Victorian experience—from tourist to colonial subject to philanthropist. Each panelist examines how a particular traveler’s expectations were shaped prior to her/his journey and makes a case for how the traveler’s voice becomes incorporated into the cultural memory. The discussion will begin to frame some theoretical conclusions about how multiple narratives add layers of complexity to cultural memory, and about the long-term impacts of that memory for further generations of travelers, writers, policy-makers, and settlers.