Page - 52 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020

52 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Rhian Waller | Postcolonial Pictures figures that adorn Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China (2011) and The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia (2008) are engaged in toil or travel. In the former case, a worker labours, bent-backed, in a paddy field. In the case of The Great Railway Bazaar, the 1995 edition depicts a turban-wearing rail worker and a conductor in a white hat, while the Penguin modern classics version (2008) shows passengers massing on a platform, and at least one vendor selling items from cart. This is a consistent pattern; people with dark-skinned bodies are depicted at work, observed and documented by the white traveller who transforms lives and labour into a form of entertainment. White, or light, bodies are depicted in leisure or repose, reflecting the privileged position of the white westerner in general. This position is underscored by the corresponding book titles — Britain is a “kingdom”, while the Mediterranean is descri- bed in terms of Ancient Greek myth, signifying both Herculean strength and early civilisation. While the DIM covers show aesthetically pleasing, idealised scenes, with no obvious signi- fiers of poverty, conflict or industry (aside, perhaps, from fishing and tourism), they encode an imbalance between subjects. White westerners appear as individuals, as separate bodies, at rest and play. In contrast, it is difficult to distinguish between commuters, workers and leisure- focused passengers on the covers of The Great Railway Bazaar. We are presented with an “undifferentiated mass of humanity” which recalls the content of early colonial travel writing (Thompson, 2011: 140). The faces are shadowed and indistinct, the colours muddied, the sepia light suggestive of nostalgia. In this case, the viewer is an individual, but the viewed subjects are a not always afforded discrete identities. The tendency toward selective de-individualisation is echoed in the text. In Kingdom by the Sea, Theroux writes: “You read one book about China and you think you’ve got a good idea of the place; you read twenty books about Britain, even English Traits and Rural Rides, and you know you haven’t got the slightest” (1984: 13). Thus, cultures and societies depicted by outsiders fall — or are forced — into a limiting set of meanings and identities. The society that writes itself and depicts itself is freer to signify complexity, specificity, individuality and plurality. Theroux’s “good idea of place” is, in fact, a poorer idea of place. Deep South (2015) bears the only cover in the No Interpersonal Metafunction (NIM) set to represent a space in a dominant economy, in this case the USA. This cover features iconic ima- ges of battered buildings and boarded-up windows which act as indexes for abandonment and economic failure. If the shops were in use, this might be an example of “paradise controlled” (Dann, 1996), where natives are depicted as vendors in service to the traveller, but their absence signifies this is no paradise at all. The title, Deep South, is suggestive. Like “darkest Africa”, it is a pre-existing but unofficial appellation. The connotations might be less obviously problematic than the latter phrase which Theroux, in his later work, recognises as a “demeaning African epithet” (2013: 29), but it may not be an entirely coincidental choice of descriptor. In addition to signifying immersion, deep implies a nadir; from here one must ascend to reach a normative status. Deep South bears the example of text integral to the photograph: a sign that reads “PASTIME”. This phrase is rich in meaning; it alludes to the purpose of the building as a site of leisure, but also to a temporal paradox. The south, Theroux reveals in his text, is in many ways locked into its history of segregation, of antebellum slavery and is detached from progress by relative poverty. It is clear several of Theroux’s subjects mourn the passing of some aspects