From Travelogues to Guidebooks: Imagining Colonial Singapore, 1819-1940‪.‬

People come to know about places in a variety of ways, among which the most important and highly valued is through travel. Travel experiences seldom occur in a vacuum, but, instead are filtered through preconceived images and expectations. Moreover, even though these images or travel representations may or may not be congruent with the actual experiences, they, nevertheless, give rise to a definition of the "place" as an entity with an identity, spirit, and personality internal to it self. In this paper, I examine travel representations of Singapore (18191940) produced by the two genres--travelogues and guidebooks. By doing so, I hope to show how these discourses are instrumental in the constitution of the colonial gee-body of Singapore. The earth is in effect one world, in which empty, uninhabited spaces virtually do not exist. Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons, but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings. (Said, Culture and Imperialism, 1993, p. 7)