Drugs and the Contemporary Travelogue
This essay theorizes the relationship between representations of travel and representations of drugs in contemporary nonfiction drug travelogues. As a popular nonfiction genre, the travelogue helps structure public perceptions of travel but, like many other forms of travel writing, frequently depicts drugs. A relatively large number of travelogues feature writers traveling with drugs, traveling on drugs, or traveling for drugs. Contemporary travelogues frequently offer travel as a paradigmatic yet problematic metaphor for understanding various kinds of drug experiences: those that involve acquiring self-knowledge or undergoing transformation, those that involve encountering radical alterity or domesticating it in neo-colonial formulations. At issue here are two drug travelogues published at the end of the twentieth century: Christopher Cox’s Chasing the Dragon: Into the Heart of the Golden Triangle (1996), and Kevin Rushby’s Eating the Flowers of Paradise: A Journey Through the Drug Fields of Ethiopia and Yemen (1998). My analysis explores how these popular accounts imagine the mobility/intoxication nexus and how that nexus engages with the dual thematics of global mobility and the illicit movement and consumption of mind-altering substances.