British women’s narratives of their travels in Aisa are pivotal texts for understanding the complexities of colonial encounters in Asia and the formation of new world imagination from perspectives that come “from below”. Drawing on the scholarship of 20th century cosmopolitanism, this essay positions travelogues by Isabella Bird, Emily Kemp, and Dorothea Hosie as critical projects that navigate the tensions of imperialism and identity while challenging established racial and cultural ideologies about Aisa. Their narratives reflect a transformative vision of an ethical cosmopolitan community that emerges from the dynamic interactions between traveller and the travellee in the context of Asia’s colonial modernity. Their affective encounters with local populations not only transcend simplistic self/other binaries but also facilitate a humanizing dialogue that redefines traditional, imperialist, and often binary thinking. Engaging with contemporary scholarship on the conjunction of affect and decolonization in travel writing studies, this essay situates these women’s travellers’ genre-blending works within the broader context of the 20th century’s shifting world orders. By analysing the interplay between personal memory and collective histories, this essay illuminates how life writing and travel writing serve as vital sites for understanding the legacies of colonialism and the imaginative possibilities they present for rethinking identity and belonging in an already globalised world.

The paper aims to broaden our knowledge of physical encounters with India by investigating how representations of sound are intertwined with depictions of cultural others. In travel writing studies, visual impressions are often prioritised, despite the fact that sound and music are central to travellers’ experiences (Agnew 2012). This is evident when travellers encountered realities that were culturally and geographically foreign to them, as was the case with East-Central European travellers in Asia. Analysing efforts to reflect unfamiliar soundscapes in travel accounts give new insights into the nature of travel writing and intercultural encounters.

In the presentation, I will focus on travel accounts about India written in the period 1869-1914, when the opening of the Suez Canal allowed an increased number of travellers from East-Central Europe to visit India. In this period, we can talk about relatively fresh impressions. Drawing on Tim Youngs’ concept of sonic tenses – the production and detection of sounds linked with movements between time layers (Youngs 2020) – I will focus on “sonic intercultural encounters,” defined as descriptions of auditory experiences linked with cultural differences encountered by travellers.

Taking into account the importance of senses for imperial encounters (Rotter 2011) and a particular “in-between” position of Polish and Serbian travellers – who hailed from subjugated and relatively poor nations but in Asia often represented European empires and associated themselves with other Europeans (Huigen and Kołodziejczyk 2023) – scrutinising “sonic intercultural encounters” opens a new perspective on the cultural history of representations and theorising East-West encounters.

The primary sources comprise a collection of Serbian and Polish travel accounts written by Milorad Rajčević, Milan Jovanović, Božidar Karađorđević, and Adam Sierakowski, Karol Lanckoroński, Paweł Sapieha, Władysław Michał Zaleski, Ewa Dzieduszycka, Stanisław Bełza, Jadwiga Marcinowska. These sources are not available in English and so far have attracted little scholarly attention.

Quoted literature

Agnew, Vanessa. 2012. Hearing Things: Music and Sounds the Traveller Heard and Didn’t Hear on the Grand Tour. Cultural Studies Review 18 (3): 67–84.

Huigen, Siegfried, & Dorota Kołodziejczyk. 2023. East Central Europe Between the Colonial and the Postcolonial in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Siegfried Huigen and Dorota Kołodziejczyk. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Rotter, Andrew J. 2011. Empires of the Senses: How Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching Shaped Imperial Encounters. Diplomatic History 35 (1): 3–19. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7709.2010.00909.x.

Youngs, Tim. 2020. Hearing In Alasdair Pettinger and Tim Youngs (eds). The Routledge Research Companion to Travel Writing, pp. 208–21. London - New York: Routledge.

This essay examines Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s narrative account of visits to Japan, Korea, and India in La vuelta al mundo de un novelista (The Trip around the World of a Novelist, 1923-24). It focuses not only on travel’s engagement with mobility and storytelling, but also with the cultural capital the traveler hopes to gain at home, and on the national stage. By referencing the colonial contexts on the Pacific and Blasco Ibáñez’s travels across East Asia, the essay aims at opening lines of interconnectivity, interdependency, and inter-relational flows to and from the Pacific on a more global scale. It contributes to the repositioning of Pacific discourses and their respective geopolitics while examining tropes of coloniality and uneven modernity that informs Blasco Ibáñez’s travel gaze. Coining the term “travel as technique” as a critical notion, it refers to the praxis of writing travel alongside history, a praxis through which Blasco Ibáñez documented global political turbulence of the 1920’s where he not only observed Korea under Japanese occupation but also visited India and Japan. Sparked by his visit and growing Hollywood fame, his novels were translated into Japanese and in 1924 alone two film adaptations of his work appeared in Japanese cinema.

Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs (1970) disrupts traditional European depictions of Japan by resisting the imposition of coherence on its cultural forms. Barthes presents Japan as a fragmented semiotic landscape where meaning dissolves into suggestion—haiku, calligraphy, and the bento box function as signs that resist Western fixity (Demeulenaere, 2024). Rather than reflecting historical or ethnographic realities, Barthes’ portrayal constructs Japan as a space of absence, an intellectual counterpoint to Western meaning systems. By emptying Japan of assumed cultural legibility, Barthes challenges Orientalist binaries (Ikegami, 1991). However, his refusal to "fix" Japan risks rendering it a conceptual experiment detached from historical and cultural specificities.

In contrast, Ian Buruma’s A Japanese Mirror (1984) and Inventing Japan (2003) engage directly with Japan’s cultural and historical realities. Where Barthes dissolves Japan into signs, Buruma emphasizes Japan’s agency in shaping its identity, exploring how cultural symbols, media, and historical shifts mediate tensions between tradition and modernity. A Japanese Mirror examines how mythology, manga, cinema, and theater articulate social anxieties, while Inventing Japan traces Japan’s reinventions through the Meiji era, war, and occupation. By incorporating historical specificity and insider perspectives, Buruma avoids reductive generalizations, offering a more relational model of cross-cultural representation.

This paper argues that Barthes and Buruma represent distinct yet complementary modes of European textual engagement with Japan, marking a key moment in World Literature’s genealogy. Barthes dismantles the colonial impulse to "know" the Other by offering fragmentation and absence as tools to resist Western paradigms. However, the abstraction of Barthes’ Japan is counterbalanced by Buruma’s historically grounded narratives, which reflect Japan’s internal complexities. Together, they interrogate the possibilities and limitations of cross-cultural representation.

By juxtaposing Barthes’ semiotic approach with Buruma’s grounded narratives, this paper highlights shifting strategies of engagement in European travel writing. Barthes challenges traditional representations of Japan, opening space for alternative modes of encounter, while Buruma’s reflective approach balances critique with cultural nuance. These contrasting strategies reveal interpretive tensions between abstraction and specificity, reflecting a broader evolution toward more ethical modes of intercultural exchange. As European writers grapple with the partiality of cultural encounters, Barthes and Buruma exemplify the importance of embracing multiplicity and nuance in representing difference.