Contemporary materialism, in its varied configurations, persistently challenges claims that the body can be relegated to a subservient position when compared to reason. In most pertinent colonial and postcolonial studies the body is seen as a text, upon and by means of which signs of difference are instituted. Yet, to be able to test and appreciate to what extent the postcolonial body was and remains today a battleground for discursive control, it is helpful to start with the awareness of the somatics of the traveller himself – his agreement to and with his own person or lack thereof other bodies, his translation of the somatic into the semantic. The traveller’s body, when rendered in writing, becomes a symbolic construct which enters into a relation with the represented world, and the nature of this multifaceted, troubled alliance – if alliance it is – forms the main theme of this book.

The Author: Zbigniew Bia?as is Professor of English and Head of Postcolonial Studies Department at the University of Silesia (Poland) and Privatdozent at the University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany). From 1995 to 1997 he was Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow in Germany and in 2001 he was Fulbright Senior Fellow in the USA. He is author of two books, editor/co-editor of five other volumes, translator of English, American and African literature into Polish.

: Literature of Travel and Exploration – The Traveller’s Body – Discursive Practices.