The Image of the Chinese in the Southeast Asian Contact Zone. National Comparisons in the Travelogues of Milan Jovanović and Władysław Michał Zaleski

Abstract

The main aim of the article is to examine the ideological background and sociopolitical framework of two different images of the Chinese communities in Southeast Asia as presented in two travelogues respectively written by the Polish clergyman Wladyslaw Michal Zaleski and Serbian writer and doctor Milan Jovanovic. Southeast Asia is treated as a “contact zone” whereby different communities are intertwined in a struggle for hegemony. The writers’ trips to Asia were conditioned by European capitalistic expansion; however, being respectively Polish and Serbian, they came from countries which were also oppressed by great powers. Analysis of their travel writings shows how imperialist and orientalist discourse might have been influenced by various factors. Differences between the two writers issued mostly from their different outlooks on the world; Jovanovi􀃼 being liberal, and Zaleski being conservative and Catholic.