Escaping Kakania: Eastern European Travels in Colonial Southeast Asia

This book is about fascinating characters - soldiers, doctors, scientists, writers, painters - who traveled from their Eastern European homelands to colonial Southeast Asia. Their stories are told by prominent experts in travel writing studies who combine their academic expertise with sensitive antennae for cross-cultural perceptions.
Due to its civilizational liminality, Eastern Europe challenges the binary construct of "East" and "West" as the fixed opposition of two homogeneous entities. Southeast Asia also swarms with heterogeneity- ethnic, religious, and otherwise. The 14 chapters deal with the diverse encounters of Eastern European travelers with the many faces of Southeast Asia. The descriptions share an affinity to two regions caught between great empires centred elsewhere, settling atop local power struggles and ideologies that existed long before the era of high imperialism.
The collection introduces the Anglophone reader to a broad array of writers and texts that expands the scope of travel literature. Some of the essays directly engage with post-colonial studies, contributing to an ongoing critical re-evaluation of eastern European "semi-peripheral" (non-)involvement in colonialism. Other chapters disclose a range of perspectives and narratives that illuminate the plurality of travelers' positions, without denying the specificity of the Eastern European gaze.