Original scientific paper
Creating Place out of Space: James Cook’s Travel Writing
Tihana Klepač
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
“National identity” claims Richard White “is an invention,” it is an “intellectual
construct” (Inventing Australia), and brennan adds that its component elements
are race, geography, tradition, history, language, size, and place (“The National
Longing for From”); and place, explains Ashcroft in The Post-Colonial Studies
Reader “in post-colonial societies is a complex interaction of language, history
and environment.” It is precisely place that Cook formulates in his journals as he
considers the vast, mystical space of the globe, seeing it, as he does all the lands he
visited, in terms of Western European rhetoric, thus enabling them to enter history
(worlding, Spivak). Therefore, his journals are an important building block in the
architecture of both, Australian and North American identity. Namely, before the
lands were even settled, Cook’s writings contributed to the formulation of what
it meant to be Australian or North American. This paper is an attempt to analyse
Cook’s discourse in the context of the Western European civilising mission resulting
from the Enlightenment, a project which erased earlier knowledges of those
lands and overlaid them with those of eighteenth-century Europe.
Keywords
national identity; Australia; North America; Cook’s journals
Hrčak ID:
23114
URI
Publication date:
17.4.2008.
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