Travel and Travel Writing in a Globalized World: A Reading of Pico Iyer's The Global Soul

Travel books are literary representations of journeys across spaces of cultural difference. The genre of travel writing, in recent decades, has produced many interesting travelogues which are also significant studies in cultural heterogeneity in the context of a world post globalization. In their attempts at reading cultural differences, these travelogues consciously move away from the binary of western and eastern cultural divide to look at the so-called globalized world from the subjective ideological position of cultural hybridity. Pico Iyer’s The Global Soul. Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home (2000), a turn of the century travel book, is one such instance of recent travel writing which offers to take a gaze at the world from the subjective position of a hybrid cultural self. In this paper, the author proposes to read Pico Iyer’s The Global Soul. Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home as an experimental travel narrative charting new grounds in the genre of travel literature. Moving beyond the physicality of the journey, the idea of ‘travel’ operates as a multiply nuanced metaphor in the narrative. If, on one level, the travelogue records Pico’s own subjective visceral responses and his reflections and observations, as he lives life on the threshold of cultures, on another deeper level, the book is a comment on the very idea that, living life as a transnational in today’s world of cultural flux, is itself an act of continual travelling across cultural borders