Food, Photography and Cartography in the Travel Memoirs of Ondaatje and Shopsin

Travel writing first evolved with Pausanius, a Greek geographer from the 2nd century AD (Pretzler). In the literary genre known as “Youji Wenxue,” authors such as Fan Chengda and Xu Xiake weaved geographical and topographical information into their writing while using narrative and prose. During the Song dynasty, Su Dongpo, a government official and poet, wrote about the Yangzi gorges and other remote southern places in China. In the Asian subcontinent, Sake Dean Mahomed published his travel book in 1794, The Travels of Dean Mahomed, which presented for the first time the idea of England from an Indian immigrant's point of view and altered the “Orientalist” outlook of early Western travel writings about the East. Graham Huggan expounds on how travel memoirs “supply their audience with the wonders, thrills and scandals of other times and other places.”
This paper analyzes and compares both postcolonial and postmodern travel writing about the Asian subcontinent countries of India and Sri Lanka. The postmodern travel memoirs Running with the Family (Michael Ondaatje) and Mumbai New York Scranton: A Memoir (Tamara Shopsin) are analyzed using three critical travel writing elements including food, photography, and cartography. These elements are often neglected in scholarly research. The research here will show how these critical elements support postmodern travel and memoir writing while challenging Orientalism.