The Imperial Origins of Cultural Governance1 Invisible (non) Power and Cartographies of Safe-Transit in the Travel Writings of Freya

Stark
Then out came the four little work baskets, and the needles flew as the girls made sheets for Aunt March. It was uninteresting sewing, but tonight no one grumbled. They adopted Jos plan of dividing the long seams into four parts, and calling the quarters Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, and in that way got on capitally, especially when they talked about the different countries as they stitched their way through them. Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

The uninteresting sewing of Alcotts little women stitching their way capitally across four continents in the confinement of the domestic sphere may systematically trigger our post-colonial defense mechanism to read into such instances of immobile travel an imperial global map in the making. But I am suspecting that this may not be the reaction of some contemporary readers who are actively involved in another type of needlework, with a more advanced technology, stitching their way through various virtual links across the World Wide Web. There is a critical consensus around the fact that de-colonization has changed the way travel books are read and written by former imperial subjects. Paradoxically, the same critical consensus insists on identifying discursive and even thematic continuities between colonial and cosmopolitan visions. Holland and Huggan, for instance, describe contemporary travel writers as retailers of mostly white, male, middle-class, heterosexual myths and prejudices catering for a readership of eager consumers of exoticculturally otheredgoods.2 Following the same line of analysis, Debbie Lisle argues that contemporary popular travel writers in English are producing new forms of power that mimic the previous sensibility of Empire,3 while maintaining a hegemonic vantage point on the peoples, cultures and lands Western travelers encounter along their planned routes (Global Politics, 191). Travel writing, its true, does create coherent discourses and hegemonic bodies of knowledge about other lands and other peoples and it does so by providing information that is totally or partially made available in the public domain. Now, to what end this information is used, who uses it or when it is used are open questions with indeterminate outcomes. The insidious place of politics in travel writing, I would argue, pertains to the fact that it is capable of passing information to policy makers and market interests while passing for nothing more or other than a travel narrative with recognizable generic features. My aim is to distinguish the history and political economy of passing information from that of passing judgment in and through travel writing and, by implication, differentiate the ideology of discourse and representation from the ideology of information in my working definition of politics. For instance, Pratts description of nineteenth century exploration writers as effaced information producers gazing in from a periphery,4 refers to the age of industrialization but also carries far-reaching implications that are relevant to that of information. The discussion of politics and of what constitutes the concept of the political can take us into diverse and complex theoretical speculations which are well beyond the scope of this paper. What I propose to look at here is the link between the ideology of information and the elusive operations of governance rather than a visible form of government. Since the beginning of the 1980s, political and social theorists identified a set of political, economic and socio-cultural conditions which gave rise to at least four different political operating codes defined as: hierarchies, markets, networks and governance.5 Without trying to make any generalizations, the comparative analysis of travel writings from the 1920s till the end of the 1950s may reveal interesting instances of a gradual move from hierarchical and bureaucratic (colonial) government to a market oriented form of governance operating through various networks long before the mid 1970s. These mutations in the exercise of power were then happening abroad in the context of two global wars and in their immediate aftermath before they were brought back home in a more sophisticated form.6 In the study of these shadowy origins of governance in travel writing, the colonized subject functions as the vanishing mediator between former imperial powers and their own subjects today. The working concept of politics I am using here is based on a definition of colonial governance as cultural governance where culture itself is an instrument of governance and an integral part of what came to be known as the culture industries rather than a site of resistance or a free-floating field with subversive attributes.

This analytical framework on the political dimension of travel writing through the lens of cultural governance underscore the complicity of the genre with, as well as its great suitability to, this neoliberal operating code for the exercise of power. First, I will explain how a travel book, when it undergoes a complex process of branding, participates in the culture industries.7 It is for that matter that travel writing must be studied in relation to the history of old and new media technologies. The focus on the early encounters of photography or cinema with travel writing will allow us to understand how the colonial economy of affects and its symbolic meanings and practices were deployed, just the way they are used today, as a highly structured economic field of power. Second, the character of the travelers is interpreted as selves in transit in order to highlight another aspect of governance on the use of identity politics and the discourse of empowerment. Finally, I will explain how the act of travel is of the same order as the movement of information and intangible goods. Travel is informed by the politics of mobility and the political economy of social networking. At some point, in the history of travel writing, the cartographies of cultural diversity and human capital became much more valuable than maps of physical geographies or natural resources.8 In the age of governance, these intangible maps may translate as market research and in an extreme case they may be used as policy documents to influence or manipulate public opinion. That is why it is quite possible for politically incorrect travel narratives to suddenly reappear on the bestseller list all in defiance of the critical tradition which has sought to expose their ethical flaws or scientific inaccuracies.9 Freya Starks war time correspondences10 with her friends and relatives and her colleagues in the Ministry of Information reproduced in most of her travel books, include intelligence material that is stealthily embedded within her travel narratives. For instance when she hinted at her overwhelming encounter with Field Marshal Wavell, she admitted that she had [finally] realized the enormity of [her] position [and] after a second or two of mutual contemplation somehow [she] brought out [her] idea and, still without a word, [Wavell] stepped across to the map of the Mediterranean and looked at it in silence (Dust, 59, emphasis added). In another remarkable instance, she was asked to find out an important technical detail from the only surviving officer of a captured Italian submarine brought to the Harbor of Aden. The detailwhatever it wasemerged, without visible prompting, in a natural way (Dust, 50) during an idle chatter she had with the war prisoner on the topic of machinery. When she traveled to India in the summer of 1945 and met with the participants at the Simla conference, she was intrigued by the aloofness of Jawaharlal Nehru, the soon to be first Prime Minster of independent India, and noted in her diary that she would like a talk alone and to get him forgetful and see what is under it all (Dust, 248). These and many other tantalizing glimpses into Starks war time service are introduced in her travel narratives in measured doses and seem to establish an implicit, but very misleading, distinction between classified and unclassified or public information. Stark [had] powers of opening the dossiers of diplomats, the files of field officers, and the codes of commodores, which are totally denied to a conscientious man (Dust, 135) but more importantly and by her own admission, her (invisible) field of operation was situated in the shadow of the official world of politics. The nature of her assignment was largely social and took [her] among all sorts of people who came to [her] flat for parties, regardless of frontiers or rank (Dust, 63). The information she discloses on that populist and unofficial aspect of her work does not seem to have been subjected to the same degree of censorship as military or political information. Two important aspects of Starks travel writing are worth noting at this point. The unclassified and seemingly banal information she provides in her work on everyday life and casual encounters with ordinary people is the type of information that is crucial to the conduct of cultural governance. In that sense, Freya Stark achieved a great degree of transparency in her writing which rendered intelligence material invisible much in the manner of Poes purloined letter which remained well hidden because it has never been hidden in the first place. It is, therefore, possible to identify an unbroken continuity in Starks writing before, during and after WWII. On the basis of this thematic aspect in her travel writing and its characteristic focus on the hustle and bustle of everyday life, which also remained unclassified in scholarly terms, it is difficult to tell whether it falls within the province of ethnography, autobiography, local history, or even political science. Before political and social theorists started linking the concept of governance to a process of hollowing out of the State11 in the 1990s, Freya Starks travel books were written against the background of the hollowing out of the Empire. Ploughing along the Arabian coast in the winter of 1937, she noted in her diary, we are now companionless in a universe in which we are unique; our pressing need is to find some harmony which once more may include us with forces equal to our own, greater than those our science has outrun.12 This pressing need to reconfigure governing structures for the exercise of power beyond bureaucratic imperial frameworks became a recurrent theme in Starks travel writings during and after WWII. But before then and in her prewar narratives of adventure and exploration, Freya Starks observations on the East reflect a precocious awareness about the bankruptcy of visible power. This is best illustrated by her description of

Colonial Officials as anachronistic bureaucrats secluded in their colonial palaces and having little knowledge about realities on the ground. The inscrutability of the Eastern mind seemed to her rather a myth. The only inscrutable object I know in Iraq, she adds, is the British Embassy, which devotes itself to physical culture in super-Oriental seclusion (Baghdad, 163). There are two recurrent discursive strategies that Stark uses in her 1930s travel writings to promote this negative image on Colonial Officials. On the one hand, she usually describes them as an impediment to Western travel, a mere bureaucratic nuisance. A long section in Baghdad Sketches is devoted to the denunciation of restrictions implemented by the British Civil Service on the movement of the female tourist who wishes to wander in Iraq (Sketches, 49- 53). Another interesting strategy Stark uses to bring home to her readers the inadequacies of the colonial model of government consists in describing colonial pioneers as relics of the empire that belong to history rather than to a modern world. Although she endorses the Ingrams indubitable right to be in the Yemen, settled in a white house behind the Sultans Palace, Stark reflects, I can see Harold and Doreen rapidly turning into legendary, tutelary deities (Winter, 141). It soon became clear to her that the old model of imperial power is embodied in a government clogged with too much power (Dust, 282). In her travel books, Dame Freya Stark opens up various testing grounds for the Empire (that is no longer one) to assess the failed policies of overcentralization13 and cure her readers of the empire complex. Neo-imperialism will have to be less visible, less tangible and essentially formless. It will derive its power from its lack of power because the modes and sites of its operations will be shifted from physical territorialities to perceptual fields of loosely defined affects and ideas. When imperialism [is re-channeled in] a desire for the enlargement of the Commonwealth idea, (Dust, 219) Stark predicts that then America loses her role of liberator (Dust, 179). In their assessment of dominant generic features in colonial and contemporary travel writing, Holland and Huggan describe the genre as a practiced art of dissimulation, conscious of itself as at once generically elusive and empirically disingenuous, deliberately dissembling, unclear. Travel narratives, like their writers, tend to conceal as much as they reveal. (Tourists, xi) Following this definition, a travel book can be seen as a brand, in the political economy sense of the term, rather than a literary genre. This process of packaging and branding is a contemporary notion whereby the use value of the product resides in the images that it evokes and the life style associated with it rather than in some intrinsic meaning or substantial content. In contrast with common wisdom, a travel book is sometimes meant to be judged by its cover and, by implication, by what it covers: its margins and appendixes, its title and its preface. So, what happens, what takes place in these sites where, for instance, scholarly information is separated from the travel narrative or when the reader is told how the book should be read and what specific purposes it is supposed to serve? The political dimension of travel writing, one can argue, partly pertains to these purely formulaic wrappings and processes of branding a rather elusive genre in the guise of travel books. From The Valley of the Assassins (1934) to Dust in the Lions Paw (1961), Freya Stark published 16 travel books which documented her extensive travel across, and sojourns in, Western Asia between 1928 and 1946. The selected examples for this paper show that there is no radical shift from the narratives of adventure and exploration to travel books which read as treaties on propaganda or studies on human psychology. 14 On the contrary, Starks lifelong intellectual and cultural investment in what she calls the art of persuasion developed under the veil of her firmly established reputation of a failed explorer with no consistent scholarly aim,15 playfully branded a born pirate [and] a born smuggler.16 Starks branding of her travel books is underscored in their prefaces authored by her editor or by Stark herself. Her first bestseller The Southern Gates of Arabia is presented as an unfinished narrative still awaiting the traveler.17 With its rough edges and unpolished conclusions relegated to the appendix; the book is meant to be read as a sort of skeleton to be clothed by local investigation (Gates, 239). In another instance, the reader is presented with a seemingly incoherent assemblage of texts that were not originally intended for publication and which were reproduced in the guise of a haphazard series of facts (East, xiii). At the same time, Stark claims that the transcript has been laboriously read from end to end by her friend Sydney Cockerell. In Starks travel writings, the reader is taken on a forced journey through a bare jumble written with no arrangement of words or style or matter.18 In a sense, these discursive strategies adhere to recognizable features which are meant to meet a set of expectations associated with women travel writings. As Sara Mills argues, the travel writings of exceptional spinsters like Stark or Bell were trapped within male colonial textual and spatial constraints both at home in response to their subservient position and abroad in their dealings with other cultures.19 Freya Stark, however, was well aware of these constraints and instead of challenging them or working against them she adopted them as one of her most recognizable signatures. Starks travel books are deliberately presented as boring gossip and seem to be oblivious to scholarly pursuits. In a book of gossip, authorship is not fully accountable and facts can be wrong and must not be taken at their face value. The loosely structured narrative in the form of diaries, autobiographies, letters, sketches,

photographs and newspaper articles invites the reader to surrender to experience rather than schematize and judge like men.20 But let us not forget that Stark was traveling through the medium of language and from her first contact with the Arabs she developed a firm conviction about their abstract love of language independently of meaning or purpose (Sketches, 65). To counteract Fascist propaganda, Stark translates an English proverb with her old preacher, turn[s] it into a rhyming couplet in Arabic, and lets it loose among the harems of Sanaa (East, 32). She supplies the local Imam with some stuff from Aden to inspire him in his sermons, (Dust, 27) and in another instance collaborates with local poetic experts to translate Wordsworths sonnets into Arab poetry. The poets words carried Dunkerque straight to the Arab heart (East, 15). But when she began her lecture tour in Chicago reciting a Wordsworth sonnet, much to her frustration, no one batted an eyelid (Dust, 189). Starks gossip is informed by her deep understanding of the power of the medium (which can be a linguistic medium, a symbolic object with specific cultural connotations or a physical technology). When she visited the deserts of Kuwait at the end of the 1930s, the country seemed to her like an untried bridegroom. But instead of lingering over the unadulterated natural beauties of the land, Starks imagination was captured by the exciting spectacle of oil drilling, and she saw in the drilling machine an Idea stronger than the elemental matter around it (Baghdad, 124). In this respect, Stark presciently predicted towards the end of WWII that the world is regrouping itself in larger units under the spur of new and swifter means of transport (East, 211). Even before she started writing openly about the art of propaganda and before her first journey east, Stark recounts an instance in the first volume of her autobiography when during the First World War she worked as a censor, scanning letters for suspicious content. She noticed that while most of the dull letters described the same banal event; in the suspicious ones the Morse code cut round stamp edges, the lining of envelopes, and the flourishes and underlinings [were] used as guides to key words (Prelude, 170). There is an interesting analogy here with Starks travel books which seem to be dull, uneventful and repetitive while their edges, linings and underlining tell a completely different story. When read together, Starks travel books constitute a seamless intelligence report and a blueprint for domestic and foreign governance rather than random fragments of travel literature. This format is best reflected in the thematic continuities she establishes between East is West (1945) and Dust in the Lions Paw (1961). While the former is described as the Arabs side of the picture and focuses on the Effendis rise to prominence; the latter is signed as autobiography and is represented as a study on the English aspect of propaganda. A crucial passage in East is West gives us a hint as to how both books and both sides of this imaginary cultural geography are meant to be read. Commenting on the Arabs love of the pure form and sound of words and the Englishmans inherent cultural skepticism, Stark explains that the Arab still vaguely connects [words] with the presence of God. Englishmen being inarticulate [are] suspecting [of] all words; they reach the things that lie behind them in silent ways of their own; but when in 1940 we came down to fundamental matters, we found the Arabian sentences and our own silences to be much the same at heart (East, 15, emphasis added). The book of Arab silence which denotes the ineffable presence of a transcendent power is folded in a book which suspects all words, and all worlds. Dust in the Lions Paw covers a global map linking four continents, a world in which British imperial power is displaced from its privileged position. In its American version, East is West is repackaged as The Arabian Isle and is intended to make Americans think of Arabs as Effendis instead of Sheiks (Dust, 226). The books political implications are misleadingly dissimulated in its affected Orientalism. Painted like a Cinquecento of the Middle East with camel caravans walking through history and people fighting in tanks, Stark tried to make The Arabian Isle look rather like those Persian miniatures with no perspective (Dust, 226). But what is Starks aim behind selling her American readership a silenced East with the cartographies of its human capital and cultural schisms wrapped up in a book of English silences? In a letter addressed to her chief at the Ministry of Information (dated 5 April 1964), Stark reminds her correspondent that a careful study of English history shows that the countrys most influential kings were foreign. She then concludes that if we annex the U.S.A. and let them rule and think they have annexed us, I feel sure we shall absorb and Anglicize them also (Dust, 270). The principle of ruling without ruling, or the idea of the British Empire reinventing itself as an invisible power, does not differentiate between democratic and colonized societies. Only an Iraqi, Stark recommends, can successfully deal with the Iraqi Press: the British should be there to stiffen, sustain, guide and occasionally corrupt him (Dust, 82). Freya Stark developed a rather forward-thinking notion of governance well ahead of its time, in a very consistent way throughout her travel writing since the beginning of the 1930s. Tracing the origins of this idea in her work in a substantial way deserves a separate study altogether because its implications can open a wide range of theoretical challenges as in the example cited above where it is suggested that governance can be applied to Britains dealings with the United States government and the Iraqi press alike. I will, however, advance three speculative premises on how Freya Stark developed this notion on maintaining power through the delegation and relinquishing of power. This notion partly originates from her careful observations of the Harem in middle-eastern societies. From her first contact with the East, she understood that the harim is usually the quickest way for diplomacy (Winter, 64) and that in the land of Cleopatra one should never underestimate that influence behind the veil (East, 88). This

imagery of a powerful and invisible presence behind the veil of weakness and oppressive seclusion resonates with Starks role in her travel narratives. In a key passage in East is West, she presents this model of feminine power as a viable model for the conduct of domestic and foreign politics.
In the great temples of Egypt the huge stone figures stand, and beside them, no more than knee-high, the figures of their wives it is rather a depressing picture of conjugal relations, but it is an excellent type of the Idea, gigantic beside the smallness of the Man, and a model to all politicians. Perhaps it is because this relation is maintained, the agent so little visible, the idea so great beside him, that the structure of the Catholic Church has stood so many centuries unimpaired. It is the lesson women learn, who hold all heaven in their hands for someone at some moment, and must watch the power depart. It is this knowledge that marks the divergence of statesman and politician; and the tradition of government must teach it... the man is nothing, the idea he wields everything (East, 65).

There is another interesting instance which may give us a clue as to where Freya Stark inferred her ideas on the efficiency of invisible power, and this has something to do with her reflections on other failed European colonial ventures. When she tried to understand how French influence in Syria managed to outlive French colonial presence in the country, she realized that ideas have an importance to Frenchmen which in Britain they lamentably lack the Frenchman recognizes and serves the intangible (East, 123). Similarly, her travel books which seem to reflect an understanding of politics well ahead of its time, deal with the originating and spreading of ideas, whose dynamic force, whose almost unlimited consequences, we are strongly unaware of (Dust, 64). Stark measures the success of her work by the degree to which she maintains for herself and her writing a very elusive position so that her own words [come] back dressed up as Other Peoples Ideas (Dust, 176). It is almost impossible to find a convincing and clear definition to make sense of what Stark means when she talks about ideas or the Idea. It is true that her work as a propagandist during the War consisted in spreading the gospel of freedom and democracy, but as in some of the examples cited above, she uses the word Idea to describe oil drilling machines, and sometimes to refer to cars and the aeroplane. But in all these examples, Stark is actually using a notion that was many decades ahead of her time. The work of cultural governance consists in the production and management (Dust, 283) of abstract words and symbols which can be reproduced and reinvigorated all over again in their own way, in whatever the climate of their transplanting may be (Dust, 65). In a school in Makalla where the assembled class sang God Save the King, Stark listened with some misgiving, wondering if this might be misinterpreted as one of these subtle British arts of propaganda. But after further investigation she concludes that the anthem is an accomplishment of which all Makalla is proud, and has no territorial implications (Gates, 40). The invisible presence of power through the cultural management of deterritorialized symbols and affects is described in Starks travel writing as the future of imperial rule (without ruling) in a (de)colonized world. It is a political approach that conflates the sphere of politics and that of cultural production and symbolic meanings. The symbol is greater than visible substance, is indeed triumphant over death and space and time. Unhappy the land that has no symbols, or that chooses their meaning without great care (East, 40). In her war time travel writings, Stark is following a Bernaysean political strategy on how to influence and transform public opinion and this is, I would suggest, the third source from which she developed her ideas on the art of public relation and the principles of governance. What Bernays calls new propaganda in his 1928 booklet on the nascent field of public relations describes a set of practices initially developed in war time then implemented to the problems of peace.21 Just like Bernays who claimed that only propaganda can bring order out of chaos, (Propaganda, 37 and 168) Stark believes that persuasion alone looks like the weapon of the future, with annihilation as the alternative (Dust, 2). The work of new propaganda is carried out by an invisible elite of rational manipulators, leading a misguided public opinion to willingly and voluntarily embrace selected products and ideas whose actual presence is sometimes not even necessary. Ideas and products are not sold directly and openly but through an associative process which consists in creating circumstances and staging spectacular events so that the promoted product appears desirable without any mediation. Starks travel books follow the same logic and consist in remapping entire fields of perceptions to create a natural demand for some ideas and products both at home and abroad. She was acting like a Bernaysean propagandist, interpreting the Empire to the Middle East and interpreting the Arab world to primary and secondary Western powers.22 This work of interpretation is carried out indirectly [by] making ones friends among the people of the country distribute and interpret ones words (Dust, 65). Those friends among the people all over the world, whether living in a democratic society or in the deserts of the Middle East are representatives of that great body which we call Public Opinion because it has no opinion at all (Sketches, 27). As a true Bernaysean propagandist, Stark was driven by a strong skepticism towards the idea of democracy and an even stronger contempt towards public opinion in democratic and colonized countries alike. ***

Stark first cultivated her brand as the last of the Romantic Travelers among the rogue nomadic bandits of Luristan but in her next travel books she distanced herself from the narratives of adventure and exploration and focused on the subterranean world of the Harem. Ultimately, she worked her way inside-out to conquer other territorialities where she capitalized on the Effendis desire to embrace a modernized way of life. These subterranean conquests are propagated through ideas that are extrinsic to the societies or networks which will become instrumental in disseminating them by contagion. The idea of democracy or that of freedom is not born from within the world of the Harem or that of the Brotherhood. Stark describes such a failed approach pursued by Colonial Officials like the work of adoptive parents striving to fit a foreign civilization on to limbs never disciplined to such restrictive garments (East, 36). The networks Stark created and inhabited constitute sites of transition and affect zones of contamination and not simply contact zones of transculturation. Where pseudo signifiers are propagated by various culture industries and grassroots networks, the idea becomes a machinic formation, a nomadic machine outside the realm of a centralized authority. The Brotherhood of Freedom which was launched during WWII in various regions of the Middle East to counteract Fascist and Nazi propaganda developed, with a system which [was] described as an imitation of Bolshevists cells (Dust, 68). The cells were maintained by religious faith, the spoken word and an ambivalent relationship to politics. On various occasions, Stark herself unequivocally claims, I am not a politician my liking, and what training I have is for the more stable science of geography, whose interest is in historic change but not in the immediate moves of knights and pawn or bishop which it determines (East, 64). The mechanisms of governance bring politics into the private (or domestic) realm and blur the distinction between them. The Brotherhood (of Freedom) was structured after the model of the Harem and within an informal and relaxed domestic setting. It was a simple organism; it just met, and drank coffee and talked; and everyone paid a few shillings a year for the privilege of doing so and wrote a small bulletin of our discussions so that all our members might think over the same things; it was written in Arabic by a journalist who joined us and gave his time and labor as a free gift (East, 55). These practices now sound very familiar to any modern netizen. The Brotherhood was maintained by free immaterial labor or what is known in the information age as the gift economy where a collective intelligence is assembled in a self-organizing community of interests (rather than people) which offers its knowledge and labor voluntarily and without financial reward.23 Like a modern virtual community, the Brotherhoods small centers sprang up spontaneously in unexpected places (East, 56). Stark presciently predicted a world which resonates with Bill Gates friction free capitalism. Such a happy exchange of friendship and service might be the new and only meaning of Empire in the world (East, 118, emphasis added). Decades before the idea of the service economy started to be used and then make some sense, and a long time before post-Fordist economies eroded the distinction between work and fun, Stark was advising the falling empire in her travel books to implement a policy of disinterested service (Dust, 282) in its former colonies and in its dealings with emerging political power states. Although this may sound like a weakening of imperial power and imperial government, it is rather a new venture which consists in ruling without ruling. It is politics without politics, in a sense like a diet pop drink or a decaffeinated coffee, a pure brand without any substantial content. It is only in so far as we wish to serve more than we want to rule, Stark observes, that we are a ruling race we shall go on ruling by mere force of events (Dust, 280). So what we are dealing with here is travel books as a medium and as a brand which were gradually becoming an integral part of the culture industries. Their power resides in their ability to transform not only geographical landscapes but primarily individual and collective perceptual fields. One could argue that any book or any medium for that matter can be used to intervene in a social and cultural landscape, so why travel books in particular? Travel books fulfill two conditions which Paul Virilio associates with modern military strategies: the acceleration of movement, and the transformation of an entire field of perception.24 This is best illustrated by the use of photography and cinema in Starks work. A Winter in Arabia (1940), for instance, is meant to be read alongside a book of pictures published as Seen in the Hadhramaut (1938). The photographs of a vanishing way of life in the East are wrapped up in the written text of another travel book where they are carefully structured and deployed as a complex travelling machine with military attributes. When tribal chieftains carry photographs of tanks and ships, of the King and Queen on camel saddles, a ten days journey across the hills where scarce a Westerner has ridden (East, 17); or when the Queens photograph wrapped in a chiffon veil embroidered with silver (Dust, 23) is offered as a present to the first lady of the Harem; photography becomes an instrument of political manipulation and can sometimes double, literally, as a weapon.25 Stark was in a sense much more efficient than the agents of Fascist propaganda because her weapons were less visible and more secretive. While Mussolini presented the Imam with a gift of guns [and] Italian doctors scattered around the country accompanied with technicians in sub-military equipment, (Dust, 21) she travelled East in the winter of 1940 to counteract German and Italian propaganda armed with a Bell and Howell cinema projector, three newsreels and two short films. As soon as Stark switched on her portable cinema among the excited Harem, she felt like one of those amateurs who succeed in calling up the Devil! (Dust, 24). Stark prides herself on the success of her mission in transforming her audience of women and children into voracious

consumers of images. She later reflects, I think I have done as much damage as one could in the time (Dust, 37). There was more demand for the cinema, and the Quadhis younger wife told [her] that when she lies down to sleep the pictures pass before her eyes every evening (Dust, 29). Both photography and the moving image brought the idea of British power (at the height of its weakness) to the remotest corners of the East. Stark noticed that the microphone explosions were the greatest success, (Dust, 26) so she would turn on the sound track when bombs or guns [came up], so that [her] audience might enjoy the noise of the explosions (East, 34). At the same time, she marveled at how Ordinary Life in Edinburgh, rather than Sheep-Farming in Yorkshire, was unanimously her audiences favorite film and how the ladies in particular were entranced (East, 33) by it. They adore itjust people walking up and down Princes Street! (Dust, 26). Once again, and in this instance, Stark makes a very sharp observation well ahead of its time. As Virilio explains in his cultural history on war and cinema: the history of battle is primarily the history of radically changing fields of perception War consists not so much in scoring territorial, economic or other material victories as in appropriating the immateriality of perceptual fields. As belligerents set out to invade those fields in their totality, it became apparent that the true war film did not necessarily have to depict war or any actual battle.26 In the culture industries, culture loses the subversive meanings that cultural studies, critical theory or even post-colonial studies associate with it and becomes an instrument of control through empowerment. In this antique atmosphere, like a new weapon of iron into the bronze age (East: 27), the portable cinema qua an imperceptible and secret weapon was a religiously forbidden object which could at that time make a noticeable difference to opinion (Dust, 20). In order to lift the religious and cultural ban on the moving-images and their innocent content, Stark carried out a subterranean campaign in the world of the Harem knowing that when one get[s] [the ladies] to wish what you wish you will get it. It might be said anywhere (Dust, 23). It was the empowered women of the Harem and not Stark herself who fought for the cinema, the very same instrument which was reinforcing their subjection and that of their male oppressors to the Empire. It was a case of managing and controlling dominant social formations, in this case a patriarchal society, through the careful identification and then infiltration of the subcultures which operate on their margins so that when the women of the harem asked for the cinema they were convinced that they were serving their own interests when in reality they were carrying out Starks work of persuasion. Edward Bernays used this strategy to promote the consumption of cigarettes among women by convincing a group of suffragettes in the 1930s to parade in the main avenues of New York while doing the unthinkable at that time that is, puffing away on their Lucky Strikes in public. In another example on the work of new propaganda through the empowerment of networks, grassroots movements and marginalized subcultures, Stark described the setting up of the broadcasting station in Jaffa in 1942. Every day about thirteen thousand words were translated into Arabic and Kurdish from English it was done by the Arabs, for the Arabs, and no one, walking through the offices and rooms, could mistake the cheerful enthusiasm of all these young effendis, who felt they were running their own show (East, 104). Stark was writing at a time when the landscape of war became cinematic (War and Cinema, 70). She expressed on many occasions her great fascination with military and communication technologies. Her passion for highways and byways went hand in hand with a childhood fascination with fire that later, in her adulthood, was dramatized by Hitlers secret weapon the first entry of the Sputnik age into [her] world, the reign of brainless metal [and] flying robots (Dust, 223). She playfully predicted that the R.A.Fs landing grounds that dotted most of the places she crossed will one day by the natural development of history become shrines to commemorate celestial visitations, long after the aeroplanes are forgotten (Gates, 38). The movie projector, innocent gossip or photographs as instruments of cultural governance, I would argue at this point, are not just dissimulated in the pure form of the travel book. A similar process of disappearance takes place in the innocent act of travel and through the character of the exemplary traveler. Here, I would describe a process of self-effacement at work in travel writing which consists in playing with various roles or roving Is that the traveler can occupy following changing circumstances to manage and conduct the insidious work of governance. Again, Holland and Huggan identified this characterization of the traveler as generic aspect which has been maintained in contemporary travel writing. Travel narratives are less concerned with recuperating, or reinventing a single self than with following the trajectory of a series of selves in transit (Tourists, 14). But what is the traveler doing behind these various selves in transit? Using the example of Freya stark, I will explain how the roving subject determines through her/ his travel valuable cartographies of cultural diversity and cultural schisms to identify safe zones of transit for capital and at the same time catalogue various sites of human capital. This is most obvious in Starks emphasis on studying the cultural background of the effendis and the interests and needs of a diverse group of women in the region.

As an Arabist travelling to practice her Arabic and to get a feel of the language in its immediate environment for the love of learning alone (Gates, 180), Stark belongs to a well-established tradition that is culturally codified as a brand rather than a coherent body of thought. It continues to conjure up images of Victorian sweetness and light that decades of reading Orientalism and writing about it have failed to deconstruct.27 However, Stark herself confesses that her interest in Arabic was purely accidental. One of her academic mentors was pained at [her] choice and would have preferred Icelandic: but [she] thought that the most interesting things in the world were likely to happen in the neighborhood of oil (Prelude, 276). Already at this point we can see how the utilitarian pursuit of someone whose success in gambling [ at the stock market in 1926] made [her] journeys to the East possible (Prelude, 328) is carefully dissimulated in this highly popularized (accidental) passion the traveler cultivated for Arabic and the Arabs. Throughout her travel books Stark characterizes herself as a role model that makes up for the bad reputation of Europe which former travelers and secluded British Officials in the East left behind. She would not give any backshish, eats with her escorts and would sit with them around the camp fire, something that neither Gertrude Bell nor the Ingrams did before her. Winter in Arabia is the most pertinent example on how Stark places herself in the position of an unclassified traveler. She dissimulates herself between two other women: the tourist and the archaeologist, and portrays herself as a mediator between these two female specimens and a culture that drove them both to physical and mental nausea. 28 In her travel writing, Stark deliberately plays with the politics of gender and the cultural connotations of female emancipation. Times and times again she insists: I am not a feminist myself, and always think this a strange word by which to describe someone who wishes to make women more like men (East, 71). She uses this caricature of female emancipation in different contexts to infiltrate the Mans world in the East and West alike. Her gender also allowed her to gain access to the world of the harem where female power is effectively at work both for and against itself. When she first landed on [an] un-British shore (Gates, 24) among a crowd of wild men, Stark was the third European woman to visit the interior and the first to go there alone (Gates, 48). A few years later, she came back in that happy East which is like a club, [and where] everybody knows you (East, 5). The American press was puzzled by the fact that she did not look like an explorer and did not know what to make of her. She is no hulking man but a frail, pixie like woman as British agent [she] is the novelists dream come true (Dust, 206). Whether adopted as citizen of Hureidha (Winter, 127) or distressed about the fact that she has taken to dreaming in Arabic (Dust, 40), Stark remains a female European enigma (Winter, 252). Gradually, then, she became a familiar sight in the East and as such she, paradoxically, carved out for herself an imperceptible private/ public world where she could pass unnoticed. Stark was not travelling only in open spaces. In the immobile and seemingly un-emancipated world of the Harem, what was really travelling is something intangible and imperceptible. The idea is to sit there, rectify rumors, and alter the atmosphere as much as one can from the standpoint of female insignificance, which has its compensations (Dust, 20). Stark created an elusive self, an imperceptible condition whereby the traveler can double as a geographer, a tourist, a propagandist, an Arabist and even an Arab and a Muslim when she gained access to a Shiite holy shrine disguised as a pilgrim. But while the traveler is capable of inhabiting these various forms, she is never arrested or captured by any of them. Starks ultimate goal is an ever receding horizon, always in sight but never reached, and as such her travels fulfilled a passion [she has] always had for roads or rivers (Gates, 8). But how does this passion for excessive (sometimes immobile) mobility translate in relation to the principles of governance? Starks comments on an instance when in the Spring of 1940 she met with the British Officials who came to discuss the question of the Shabwa frontier in Aden show how her understanding of mobility is unsuitable to maps drawn by a bureaucratic government. This is a region which has a specific significance to Stark because it was the site of her first failed adventure of exploration as well as the subject of one of her first bestsellers. For her, what matters most is to maintain the Shabwa frontier as an imaginary boundary meandering through history and geography. More importantly, she predicts that boundaries erected to restrain the movement of people and goods will always challenge the power of States. More than half the troubles of governments come through the effort to impose fixed barriers on what nature has made fluid all normal people will break through a frontier rather than die of hunger or of thirstwhether it be the crossing of the Danube in the decline of Rome or the watering of camels at illicit desert wells (Dust, 34). Stark is also remembered for her scientific endeavor to give a voice to the Arabs by correcting misconceptions in her readers minds that the East is just the East a homogenous lump [a] fault [that] lies with the printers of maps (Winter, 24). Stressing the heterogeneity of the Arab World, however, establishes a wide range of cartographies: a cartography of tribal animosity, another one distinguishes Arabia Felix from Arabia Deserta; the tribal chieftains in their tents are distinguished from the Effendis in their city dwellings. Another cartography of racial differences sets the Arab against the modest reach of the African brain (Gates, 91), and in one instance Stark goes as far as presenting an eloquent apology in support of slavery (Gates, 119). Radical differences in religious belief represent yet another cultural map drawn and documented by Starks

travel writings.29 These maps of cultural diversity transcend the boundary and jurisdiction or even the cultural identity of the nation state. It then becomes possible for Stark, for instance, to identify a number of cultural affinities between all mountain people whether in Yemen or Scotland (East, 23). As Edward Bernays notes from his observations on American society, the new propagandist needs to be well aware of the organized habits and opinions of the masses (Propaganda, 37). In that sense, Starks travel books represent a pertinent example of the type of information and the category of maps that are relevant to the exercise of (imperial) governance which later emerged in the field of public relation, public policy and the culture industries as practiced today. In that sense too, it is possible to say that travel writing in its contemporary post-colonial form works following a Bernaysean model when it aims, sometimes inadvertently and despite its best intentions, at sketching the individual the mass mind and especially the anatomy of society with its interlocking group formations and loyalties (Propaganda,55). It would be a mistake if these cartographies of human capital and sites of transit were interpreted as a corrective to colonial strategies of othering, when it is more appropriate to direct our critical energies towards a better understanding of the various strategies of othering which make us all the (dis)empowered others of todays economies of desire and affects all over the world. Starks travel writings alternate the discourse of othering with a more learned focus on identity politics, cultural hybridity and racial difference. Maintaining these seemingly contradictory positions is a characteristic aspect of governance which has no core discursive values through which its project could be advanced.30 The East is radically different from the West when Stark seeks to justify the moral superiority of the British Empire and the legitimacy of its imperial mandate. In this case the East is usually gendered and depicted as a homogeneous entity with female attributes constructed by nature rather than culture or history. The behavior of her housekeeper who spent most of his time reading poetry instead of doing his housework seemed to Stark like the Orient and Occident under one roof. The Orient does not get much done the Occident, busily building, has its eyes rigidly fixed on the future (Dust, 35). In total contrast with this emphasis on radical difference between East and West, Stark directs her energies towards yet another argument seeking to convince her readersand mostly policy makers among themthat the East is the West. Here, her argument draws on scholarly references to history rather than on romanticized and gendered reflections on Nature and its mysterious ways. Moving from the Middle East to India allowed Stark to appreciate the idea of being in an absolutely foreign land a long way from home. In contrast with the undiluted foreignness of India, The Levant and Egypt, and to a large extent Iraq, is not orientalthey look to the West and, incidentally, all the Western ethics came from the Levant (Dust, 159). When the East is reduced to West, this does not mean that the British who are the salt of the earth (Dust, 159) have suddenly become its dust like their Eastern cousins. The logic of they are us and we are them sets the rhetoric of imperial moral superiority aside to address practical utilitarian objectives. The East is rather understood, in these specific instances in Starks travel books, as a zone of transit, a mere site of crossing, and perhaps it is partly for this reason that it is almost impossible to find in Starks travel writing a substantial passage reflecting an aesthetic appreciation of the natural landscapes she crosses. Any interest in the region should then be called safe transit and not imperialism (East, xix). Americas interest in the region, on the other hand, is a business interest, centered on oil, and notlike the Britisha geographic interest (East, xxi). The focus on documenting Asia and its schisms (Sketches, 35) is an integral part of the strategic policy of securing zones of safe transit for goods, people and ideas. In that sense, Freya Stark traveled to transform the places she visited rather than be transformed by them. Ironically, the traveler herself became a zone of transit, a servant of the intangible, and an ardent supporter of light travel. Unburdened with possessions, [she] wandered lightly on the surface of the world, [driven by] the sight of a road that vanishes, a road that winds into a distance, the landscape of to-morrow melting into the landscape of to-day (Winter, 196). This was Starks world, but it is also the world we live in today. *** There is a great consistency in Starks travel writings before, during and after WWII. The recurrent themes highlighted in her travel narratives and in her scholarly books and articles on history, geography and human psychology can be summed up in the following four points: 1) a consistent focus on the study of cultural diversity, 2) the emphasis on the discourse of empowerment; 3) a practical analysis on how pseudo signifiers, such as freedom or Western democracy can suture and bring together pre-existing heterogeneous interests; 4) and finally the emphasis on mobility, movement, roads, highways and zones of transit and circulation. These four elements are recognizable ingredients of cultural governance affiliated with neo-liberal economies and politics. What Freya Stark was describing in her travel writing since the 1930s is an early example on the type of information that is valuable to, and used by, governance as a nascent power structure which gradually replaced the old hierarchical and centralized imperial model. So when our understanding of politics shifts from government to governance, from centralized power to decentralized power delegated to various institutions and governing bodies and exercised through them, it might be difficult for us to distinguish Western subjects from

colonial subjects. Perhaps there is a need for scholarly studies on travel writing to determine exactly when and how this distinction became practically untenable while it continued to be discursively present in the reading and writing of travel narratives. It is for that reason that the political dimension of travel writing needs sometimes to be addressed from a different angle beyond orientalist paradigms, discursive strategies of othering and identity politics altogether. At the same time, we need to define and state as clearly as possible the critical project which informs the inclusion of home and abroad in the same analytical field and make sure that our critical perspectives do not lapse into the discourse of transculturation. Another danger involved in these conflations may arise from the very nature of the ideology of information. In Stoles recent book for instance, the reopening of colonial archives to deconstruct the idea of colonial government and colonial policies as an incoherent project haunted by anxieties and failures can easily render a great service to the engineers of global policies rather than simply redeem the former colonized subjects.31 Historicizing the meaning of politics in connection with travel and travel writing will perhaps consist in identifying cartographies of affects and maps of selves in transit in order to explain how politics has reached its most advanced degree of secrecy, its vanishing point, a point at which it has become an invisible power maintained through the management and governance of the lack of power.

Hager Weslati

10

A slightly different version of this article appeared in Brisson, Ulrike and Bernard Schweiser (eds.) Not So Innocent Abroad. The Politics of Travel and Travel Writing. (Cambridge Scholars P, 2009) 2 Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters. Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing (University of Michigan Press, 2000), viii. 3 Debbie Lisle, The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 5. 4 Mary Louise Pratt, Scratches on the Face of the Country; Or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen (Critical Inquiry, Vol. 12, No. 1, Autumn, 1985), 127 5 R. A. W. Rhodes, The New Governance: Governing Without Government (Political Studies, XLIV (1996), 653. 6 compare with laboratories of modernity 7 Also called the creative industries, the culture industries are identified in the jargon of local and global governance as an economic sector which includes a comprehensive map of incorporated activities from popular to high culture alongside a wide range of sites of entertainment and cultural consumption such as museums, art galleries or even nightclubs. The media industry is an integral part of the culture industries and the great value attributed to ideas and creative skills reflects the growing significance of the knowledge economy and the primacy of intangible commodities. 8 In his lectures at the College de France (1978- 1979), Foucault explains in The Birth of Biopolitics that neoliberalism opened up all aspects of life and all activities and institutions to an economic grid by which they are operated, assessed and regulated. Similarly, the individual is considered as an enterprise, hence the emphasis on the cultivation of human capital and human life at any one stage of its existence. In travel writing, we need to pay more attention to the processes by which human geography is understood in terms of human capital in this purely economic sense rather than in accordance with discourses of empowerment, cultural diversity and identity politics. 9 The military invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq increased the appeal of the Barbary captivity narratives as well as that of desert literature and travelogues focused on narratives of suffering and survival in harsh natural environments. In 2004, Dean King retold Rileys Authentic Narrative (1817) to a wide American readership in his own words in what was promoted as a national bestseller Skeletons on the Zahara. A True Story of Survival. In his note to the readers, King writes on the website promoting the book that Skeletons on the Zahara reminds us of the hard won lessons that these bold Connecticut sailors learned on the edge of the fierce Arab world. (http://www.deanhking.com/skelDeannote.html) The website also claims that the book is currently being developed as a long feature film. Kings book received great media publicity, was translated in several languages and was sensationally serialized in National Geographics Adventure Magazine in February, 2004. In October 2006, the History Channel aired a two-hour special documentary (Wildeyes Productions) to celebrate Rileys achievement. Also worth noting in this respect is the renewed interest in Lawrences Seven Pillars of Wisdom which is periodically reissued in more unabridged versions and newly packaged editions. The book alongside Patais The Arab Mind (1973) are the classic items on the Marine Corps must reading list despite the fact that the latter in particular, if scholarly assessment is to be trusted, is a very dated reference book. 10 Although the focus here is on the travel writings of Freya Stark, selected references from her workimportant as they are as subject of study in their own rightare primarily used as examples to illustrate and contextualize the close connection between cultural governance and travel writing since the 1930s. 11 R. A. W. Rhodes, The Hollowing Out of the State: The Changing Nature of the Public Service in Britain (Political Quarterly, 1994, 138-51). 12 Freya Stark, A Winter in Arabia (London: John Murray, 1940), 52-53. 13 Freya Stark, Dust in the Lions Paw (London: John Murray, 1961) 282. 14 The selected texts from Starks work cover her travel in Western Asia between 1928 and 1946 but they also reflect the way her travel books function following a closed system of references within themselves which does not follow a chronological progression, but has a cartographic implication. These travel books represent different points, regions and territorialities dispersed on a map covering a life time of travel. 15 Dorothy Middleton, Obituaries: Dame Freya Stark 1893- 1993 (The Geographical Journal, Vol. 159, No. 3, Nov., 1993), 368. 16 Jane Fletcher Geniesse, Freya Stark. Passionate Nomad. (London: Pimlico, 2000), xvii. 17 Freya Stark, The Southern Gates of Arabia (London: John Murray, 1936), 227. 18 Freya Stark, Travelers Prelude (London: John Murray, 1950), 335. 19 Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference. An Analysis of Women Travel Writing and Colonialism. (London and New York: Routledge, 1991) and Gender and Colonial Space (Manchester University Press, 2005) 20 Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference, 104. 21 Edward Bernays, Propaganda [1928] (New York: h. Liveright. Reprinted by Ig Publishing, 2005), 55. 22 When she traveled to the United States in the winter of 1943 to promote the White Paper, Stark was met with great hostility over Britains imperial policies in India. She then realized that the very word East almost unconsciously entangles the imagination of her American audience with India and therefore decided to drop the word East from the Middle East altogether and use the phrase Arab World instead. This speech accommodation that Stark had to reluctantly observe in the United States contradicts her own position in her travel writing which sought to correct misconceptions of the Arab World as a homogeneous cultural entity. This epithet also goes against British interests in the region which consist in creating a Middle East, i.e., a zone of transit between Europe and its strategic interests in the Far East. 23 Tiziana Terranova, Free Labor. Producing culture for the Digital Economy (Social Text 63, Vol. 18, No. 2, Summer 2000, 33- 58) 24 Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Semiotext(e), 1991). War and Cinema. The Logistics of Perception (London & New York: Verso, 1989). Negative Horizon. An Essay in Dromoscopy (London & New York: Continuum, 2005).

25

During her failed expedition of 1934 across the Hadhramaut Valley, Stark stopped by the town of Khuraiba where the inhabitants showed a great excitement at the site of a European woman among them. At one point Stark was chased across the streets by a large crowd when she suddenly decided to stop and snapped her camera at the gathering inhabitants. Not only did this act diffuse the hostility brooding in her reluctant hosts, it brought the chase to a halt and instantly relocated the inhabitants of Khuraiba within the frame of Starks improvised group photograph (Gates, 108). 26 Paul Virilio, War and Cinema, 7. 27 Susan Bassnett, for instance, claims that Gertrude Bell and Freya Starks traveling and writing about their travels was not prompted by the kind of populist journalistic motivation that drove Rosita Forbes round the world, but seems to have arisen from a dual process of self exploration and a desire to inform the Anglo-Saxon readers of the wonders of the Arab and Persian worlds (The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, 236). For a Public Relations expert writing in 1946, Starks East is West is a book written by an Arabophone who takes so keenly to the lure of Western knowledge. But the end is clear. It is levantism (Dust, 272). A more recent assessment, this time formulated by an academic, describes Stark as one of the late Arabists engaged in the project of authenticating the Bedouin, in documenting their lives and giving them a voice (Ben Coking, Writing the End in Journeys, Vol. 8, Issue 1-2, 61). Billie Melman claims that to interpret the Arabists experience and its representations solely in terms of institutional imperial affiliation and its politics would be to reduce desert travel to an epiphenomenon of late colonial diplomacy. It was travelers individual quests and their particular searches for personal redemption in the desert that shaped their political vision of the peninsula, as well as building their own identities as Orientalists (The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, 114). The conquest of the void is interpreted in terms of a Victorian penchant for wild and barren landscapes, or a desire to domesticate the wilderness. Those acts of ordering, Melman contends do not pertain to any political dimension. Its simply a question of humanizing the Arab, documenting his life and making him audible (117). 28 Archaeologist and Cambridge scholar Gertrude Caton Thompson did not want to see the people but just ruins and remnants of the past. Stark promised to keep her, as far as possible, separate from the inhabitants of the land (Winter, 26). Elinor Gardners condescending judgment on the manners of the Arab is an attitude of someone who spends her life among intellectual females (Winter, 43). The two female companions at one point became ill and locked themselves up not wanting to have any dealing with anyone all to the dismay of the locals. Stark on the other hand carries on her active involvement with local culture. 29 Starks choice of home (dolls house) in the slums of Baghdad right at the heart of the Moslem quarter, a fanatical part of town (Baghdad, 7) is staged as a public spectacle. She picks up her first dwelling right in front of a mosque, the Shia Mulla looked on from a distance with a sour expression (14) Stark choice of housekeeper in the person of a sullen Armenian woman with loud ways among our decently secluded Muhammadans (18) is quite revealing. Stark sets off to chastise her and restrain her provocative manners. As such, becomes reputed among her hosts as a good example of decency and friendly behavior. 30 Dillon, Mick and Jeremy Valentine, Introduction: Culture and Governance Journal for Cultural Research Vol. 6, Issue 1& 2 (January- April 2002, 5-9), 8. 31 In her recent book Along the Archival Grain (Princeton University Press, 2008), Ann Laura Stoler reopens the official documents of colonial archives in the Indies to study practices of governance lodged in particular archival forms which were not made available in the public domain. She suggests that this classified body of colonial knowledge exposes the anxieties of the colonial government and seem to tell a different story about colonial hegemony. This body of knowledge constitutes sites of epistemological and political anxiety rather than skewed and biased sources (20). The case study I am using in the paper from the work of Freya Stark shows a different approach to information and to the anxieties of imperial power. It repositions policy documents in the public sphere. In this case, it seems to me that Stark represents a brand of travel writers who did embody the principles of cultural governance avant la letter in the sense that she did not really have to go underground with her writing perhaps in the name of what we now understand as managerial transparency and accountability. While Stoler is digging in the archives of colonial government, it seems to me that travel writers like Stark were dearchiving a similar type of material that could have been produced and made public only within the framework of (colonial) governance. Governance does not archive, it de-archives; and it does not go underground and classify, it rather de-classifies and spreads in networks. Governance is grounded in an ambiguous principle of unrestrained access and professes to have a very democratic approach to information.