Racializing Travel Narrative

Continuing my reading “around” the Adriatic, I picked up Jan Morris’s 1980 book The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage and read the parts that focus most on the Adriatic, skimming the other parts. The Venetian Empire in the period she’s interested in exploring included Cyprus, Crete, Constantinople for a brief moment in the 13th century, and a few additional locations, so I limited my reading to where she writes about the city of Venice, Dalmatia, the Bay of Kotor, Korčula, and Corfu, “key to the Adriatic,” and — I’m going to claim — perhaps more than that, with a passing brief description of Rab.

It’s not a scholarly work, but it’s serious and thorough when she focuses on specific places, personnages, and events. Sometimes she floats across the surface to get to the moment or place she wants to get to. This doesn’t bother me. Essay writing does this routinely.

But there is one rather consistent feature in her account that did bother me, and that is her tendency to racialize on top of her generalizations. Generalizations also go hand in glove with essay writing, but when perched atop cultural claims that are put in racial terms, they begin to make me uncomfortable.

Here’s an example:

The Venetians could never escape Jewry. In all their chief possessions and trading posts they found clusters of Jews, clannish and disputatious, at once disconcerting and indispensable. Jews were the intermediaries and interpreters of their commerce — the Jews of Turkey in the sixteenth century nearly all spoke four or five languages, and sometimes ten or twelve. The Republic was always ambivalent towards them. Perhaps the Venetians felt a little too close to Jewry for their own comfort, for there has always been, in my view, something Hebrew in the bearing, the enterprise, the style, the separateness and even the look of the Venetians. Much Jewish blood, I do not doubt, went into Venetian veins in the course of their centuries of intercourse with the Levant, and the Oriental strain that everyone noted in things Venetian was often less Muslim or Byzantine than Jewish.

(p. 144, emphasis added)

This passage made me sit back in my chair. How could she write this in 1980?! Well, I suppose, what can one expect after “centuries of intercourse“? She was a careful writer. This is deliberate. Dismissing it as simple racism or old-fashioned anti-Semitism does not do it justice. It’s more complicated than that, I think.

She makes a claim here about Venetian mixture as distinctive. It’s not the only one. Later, she does almost the same thing with the Slavs.

Above all the Slavs, who did so much of the work of the Venetian Empire, are recognizable everywhere [in Venice] to this day. […] By [the fall of the Empire in 1797] Venice was half-Slav, and it remains hardly an Italianate city in the popular kind. Those thoughtful blue eyes, those hefty shoulders of bargees and market-men, come from the coasts of Dalmatia, so long the recruiting-grounds of the Republic; and the gondolier himself, the very herald of Venice, often has in his blood the sea-salt blood of Perast or Hvar.

(pp. 181-82, emphasis added)

Again I am taken aback by the quick move into the mixing of blood, the racialized claim that sweeps phenotypes together (blue eyes, hefty shoulders) into a distinctive mix.

What she believes the Slavs gave to Venice also becomes clear as she travels, just a bit — she never seems altogether comfortable on the Eastern side of the Adriatic — along the Dalmatian coast, touching on a few islands en route back to her starting point in the Lagoon.

A particular aesthetic governs the Dalmatian coast, corroded though it is in many parts by the stain of tourism. It lies partly of course in the splendour of the landscape […]. It is partly the climate too […]. Perhaps it is partly the nature of the inhabitants, almost all Slavs now even in the towns, tough and stocky people, made a little more drab by the exigencies of Communism and given to particular violence in war, who slump themselves opposite you at the dining-table grim and unresponsive, but can be coaxed with patience into true bonhomie.

But what chiefly gives the coast its tang, and makes it like no other shore, is the particular blend of the Latin and the Slav, which is the gift of Venice to Dalmatia.

(p. 168, emphasis added)

Again mixture, blending, this time in the look and feel of the built environment, drawing on two (somehow the Jewish element has disappeared) rather racialized notions of culture.

I find it remarkable that she writes about these things in this manner, even more so that she seems to celebrate the mixture itself, often in terms of miscegenation.

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