Echoes from the Margins

Together, these travelogues shatter the binaries that uphold colonial discourse-insider versus outsider, observer versus observed, subject versus object. Parkes remakes her identity through total immersion; Begum cements hers through strategic authorship. Parkes enjoys the spoils of empire even as her prose trembles with unease at its arrogance. Begum couches her dissent in syntax palatable to British temperament, yet never surrenders her regal perspective. Positioned at opposite poles of the colonial spectrum, they both illuminate the brutal alchemy of power, gender, and authenticity forged in the crucible of travel.

Deploying feminist literary theory, postcolonial critique, and travel studies, this book rips open the layered politics inscribed in these texts. It reveals that these travelogues are not passive recollections or sterile geographic logs; they are battlegrounds where belonging, agency, and authorship are claimed-and violently defended. In these semi-autobiographical chronicles, Parkes and Begum invent new selves, staking out spaces that a world hell-bent on confining them never intended to grant.