The Colonial Gaze in Pico Iyer’s Falling off the Map: A Postcolonial Critique

Abstract

Pico Iyer’s Falling off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World (1993) is an account his journeys to Bhutan, Cuba, Iceland, Vietnam, Argentina, North Korea, Australia, and Paraguay, places that are, in his terms, politically, geographically, or culturally marginalised within dominant global narratives. His transnational background, extensive mobility, and apparent sensitivity to cultural difference distinguish his work from the overtly imperial travel narratives of the past. This article, however, examines the ways in which colonial modes of representation continue to operate within his accounts of these “lonely places.” Drawing on Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, Mary Louise Pratt’s theories of the contact zone and anti-conquest, and Graham Huggan’s critique of the postcolonial exotic, the study argues that Iyer’s representations frequently transform cultural difference, remoteness, political isolation, and material inadequacy into objects of literary and aesthetic interest. The traveller’s authority to classify places as “lonely” reveals the persistence of unequal relations between the observer and the observed. Thus, Iyer’s work demonstrates how colonial habits of seeing can survive in contemporary travel writing in subtle and transformed ways.