Rizki Putri Dianti, 2211417055 (2022) NOSTALGIA IN WESTERN TRAVEL WRITING IN IYER’S YESTERDAY ONCE MORE: A POST-COLONIAL STUDY. Under Graduates thesis, Universitas Negeri Semarang.

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Abstract

Western travel writing is a literary work written by writers from Western countries who make a real journey to countries in Asia (East) and tells about Western depictions against the East. In one of his travel stories, Yesterday Once More, Pico Iyer, a travel writer who upholds the United States (West) identity, tells about his journey in Vietnam (East). The aim of this research is to find the places which show the interconnections between Western travel writers and Eastern places. This research used a descriptive qualitative method. Through the postcolonialism theory, which is Orientalism by Edward Said, and nostalgia discourse, this study tried to capture nostalgia strategies that are used by Western travelers to associate travel writing with colonial values. The result shows that in Iyer’s travel writing, the traces of colonialism hold images of the colonial past in the East, especially in Vietnam, such as colonial heritage building, colonial heritage road, traces of war, and the depiction of war used as tourist attractions for the West. Western travelers represented by Iyer, use a nostalgia strategy or travel-to-the-past in the post-colonial era to confirm the identity between The West and The East. In the post-colonial framework, nostalgia for the colonial era is represented in Western travel writing, in which the East is labeled as “The Other”. It returns back the image of the East in the future to the image of the East in the past on the present travel. In Iyer’s Yesterday Once More, Vietnam is used as the past form of the West (Iyer’s chosen cultural identity). The impact of the positioning of Vietnam in this essay in the eyes of the international community is Vietnam is positioned under the position of the Western countries (as The Other of Western Countries). This emphasizes Western superiority and Eastern inferiority. There is a binary opposition between the West and the East, such as the West is related to the present and the modern, and the East is related to the past and the traditional. In addition, the East’s past in the colonialism era in Western travel writings is used to restore the glory of the West as in the colonial era (when the East was still colonized by the West).

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