(I was reminded of Edmund White's wry aside in The Flaneur, where, after describing Paris's office district as an area that "went directly from being futuristic to being passe without ever seeming like a normal feature of the present", he confesses "Honestly, instead of 'like a normal feature of the present' I almost wrote 'without ever being inscribed within the interior of the present'. That's how much I've been submerged in contemporary French nonfiction".)

More convincing is Forsdick's other corrective to the overtly nostalgic turn in exoticism: the exploration of domestic spaces. The key work here is Francois Maspero's Les Passagers du Roissy-Express (1990), which describes a month-long journey along the RER-B line of Paris's suburban periphery. By exploring the fragmented diversity of la banlieue, an area usually perceived by outsiders as a grey transit zone between Paris and the provinces, Maspero's account conveys the disorienting effects of travel close to home. What is particularly interesting, though, is how diffuse this sense of depaysement becomes in a place where so few people are really at home. Many of the African residents whom Maspero and his co-traveller Frantz meet along the way are sans-papiers living a borderland existence, wary of the travellers' photograph-taking and suspecting them of being police agents. The effects of these encounters eventually take their toll in Les Passagers; as in all good travel writing, the travellers are transformed by their journey, and their once secure identity blurs as they become absorbed by a milieu of migration and marginalization.

As Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Cultures so convincingly shows, the conventional purpose of travel literature as a form of cultural transfer -exporting the exotic back home -has dwindled in importance, and for good reasons. Not the least of these has been the historic shift of exoticism to the metropolitan centres of France, as the erstwhile "objects" of imperial eyes began to articulate their own experiences of travelling away from the former colonies. Today's travellers are generally more circumspect about the ways in which they represent cultural diversity, often using irony or self-effacement as the markers of a more critical awareness of travel's complexities. If our understanding of travel has been perpetually renewed through the twentieth century, surely this is because travel, like writing, is less about self-discovery than self invention. In our quest to create new ways of seeing the world, destinations will always remain necessary mirages -as Segalen wrote to Debussy: "In the end, I came here looking for neither Europe nor China but for a vision of China".