Since the second half of the nineteenth century, imperialism has not only been about conquest, invasion and domination, but increasingly became a thing of the mind. It is relevant, therefore, to study the Western systems of cognition and interpretation which Europe deployed in the process of its colonial expansion and in understanding the non-Western territories with which it came into contact. The force of these interpretative schemes is collective and incremental, and therefore, also the memory work of women travel authors cannot solely be considered as singular and aesthetic. Their travel texts and memories which will be the object of examination in the following chapters, will be situated in this chapter in relation to the complex symbolic and material articulations of the imaginative and ideological structures of the imperial Dutch and British societies, past and present, which helped to produce them.

In particular, I will address how women's literary representations of colonial memory give shape to, and are shaped by, colonial discourses, and by the perpetuation of these colonial discourses in the aftermath of Dutch and British imperialism by a series of re-enactments, displacements and projections. The approach taken combines postcolonial discourse analysis with colonial historiography of the Dutch East Indies and Rhodesia in order to bring into view the concrete meanings of the memory discourses expressed by Aya Zikken, Marion Bloem and Doris Lessing respectively. These are conditioned by the historically-specific conditions in which Dutch and British imperialist practices in the Dutch East Indies and Rhodesia took place, and by the distinct Dutch and British cultures of colonial remembrance in which these women travellers are positioned. In order to further understand some of these idiosyncratic particularities and concrete dissimilarities, colonial discourses in the Dutch East Indies and Rhodesia and postcolonial discourses in Britain and the Netherlands will be approached from a comparative perspective.