Anti-Orientalist Moments in Edmund O’Donovan’s Travelogue: The Merv Oasis

AbstractViewed as the defender and legitimizer of Western Imperialism, travel writing has been the object of paranoid reading and examination by postcolonial critics like Edward Said. When the Orient becomes Western travelers’ destinations, their travel accounts, Said argues, envision their encountered spaces as the embodiment of a dysfunctional world serving as a perfect foil for the Occident's masculinity, vitality, stability, rationality, and normality. In doing so, they, according to Edward Said, perpetuate and reinforce the fictitious pictures of the Orient. Though Said’s critical analysis is persuasive and incontestable, his perspective does not cast light on the moments that some Western travelers eschew the cultural trap of an Oreintalistic frame of thinking. Accordingly, the present study seeks to illustrate this textual divergence from Orientalism in Edmund O’Donovan’s The Merv Oasis relating his journey to and captivity in Merv when Turkmen in their anti-colonial resistance against the Tsarist regime in the second half of the nineteenth century. The study argues that O’Donovan illustrates anti-Orientalist moments in his travel account in three ways, firstly, when he becomes his travelees’ object of incessant gaze rather than the sole gazer, secondly, when he depicts Tsarist travelers as thieves rather than local people, and thirdly when he sketches a humane picture of his travelees by highlighting their tolerance towards Jews, and finally, when he steers clear of bolstering the myth of Oriental indolence.