Page - 49 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Rhian Waller | Postcolonial Pictures 49 include distant figures and constitute the Distant Interpersonal Metafunction set (DIM). The sole Penguin book cover published in the last 30 years to offer a close-up, clearly interpersonal image is the 1992 edition of The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific. This is the only example of Close Interpersonal Metafunction (CIM). It is tempting to identify a colonial dimension to these aesthetic choices, which echo Pratt’s identification of “promontory descriptions” and the “estheticis[ing]” of landscapes “discovered” by the imperialist explorer (198–199, 2007). Some of these regions consist of developing econo- mies, where the lives of inhabitants are shaped in sharp contrast to (and also by) the comparative social and geographic mobility and economic power of powerful westerners. Residents may face barriers that restrict their movements and their quality of life. Theroux and his subjects are alert to this imbalance. For instance, one interviewee bitterly observes: “All Canadians[…] Gringos, gringos, gringos[…] Arabians[…] But if a Mexican wants to go to their country — hah!” (2019: 197). Theroux writes about the complex and intersecting histories and cultures within Mexico, noting the densely populated cities, the multiplicity of languages, foodstuffs, religious practi- ces and personal perspectives. And yet, the cover and title of On the Plain of Snakes signifies unoccupied wilderness rather than urban space or a contended borderland. The desert image foregrounds cactus and wind-smoothed yellow stone, purpling mountains sit in the middle-distance below a lilac sky lit by a cloud-fogged sun. The composition of the image frames this as a space for the traveller to move into, as unclaimed territory, and this carries uncomfor- table echoes of frontier narratives and the myth of the empty New World. It is a “Mexico […] redu- ced to stereotypes” (Theroux, 2019: 151), and it era- ses already disadvantaged peoples from the visual narrative. The semiotics of absence are powerful; the myth of terra nullius (“land of no one”), fed into manifest destiny, an ideology of white western supremacy that, in part, fuelled the colonisation of North America (Dodge, 2013). This ideology was used to justify mass slavery and indigenous genocide, and is still deployed today to defend aggressive eco- nomic intervention and land-annexation in Africa by the global north (Giesler, 2015; Makki, 2011). In this case, the cover image operates both as synecdo- che for the far larger and more varied geography of Mexico, and also as a reductive metonym, wherein a multifaceted country and culture are symbolised by desert, an image that signifies isolation, danger, primitivism and extremes of nature. In contrast, western environments, as in The Kingdom by the Sea, are signified by locations shaped by human activity: picturesque beach huts are set in an orderly line, their shapes symmetrical and their exteriors painted white with colourful accents. Pillars of Hercules includes shore-side buildings. Fig 3: On the Plain of Snakes (Theroux, 2019)