Since the late 1970s, there has been considerable scholarly engagement with questions of travel and ethics within and across the disciplines of anthropology, linguistics, modern languages and literary studies. Three landmarks are Edward W. Said's Orientalism (1978), James Clifford and George E. Marcus's Writing Culture: The Politics and Poetics of Ethnography (1986) and Syed Islam's Travel and Ethics (1996). Said was among the first to take travel writing seriously. His 1978 study inaugurated a focus by postcolonial critics on travel writing's complicity with colonial discourse (see colonialism and orientalism). Concentrating on accounts of the Middle East, Said argued that travel writers have promoted and perpetuated established myths about corrupt despots, fanatical Muslims, labyrinthine thought-processes, noble Arabs and alluring women (Hulme and Youngs 2002, 107). Said's study fostered widespread investigations of his claim that travel writing autocratically denies colonized subjects a history or a voice (107). Islam's book made a major contribution to the subsequent debate. The Ethics of Travel similarly emphasizes travel writing's generic and historical tendency to produce one-sided portrayals of intercultural encounter to which travellees have no right of reply (Islam 1996, 2013).

Today, many scholars have retained Said and Islam's pessimism about travel writing's culturally imperialist nature. Debbie Lisle's (2006, xi) book The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing argues that travel writing overwhelmingly entrenches a ‘conservative political outlook’. Postcolonial scholarship by Steve Clark, Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan claims that, representationally speaking, contemporary travel writing continues to resemble ‘one-way traffic’ (Clark 1999, 6). A common ethical complaint against travel writing is that travellers lack solidarity with the travellees featured in their accounts. Meanwhile, scholars have amassed evidence to support the claim that travel narratives both inherit and entrench established modes of representing particular regions. Paraguay, for example, has been alternately represented as Arcadia, Eden and El Dorado (Fowler 2013, 55). Such patterns are geographically varied and often contradictory. While Afghans have, for instance, traditionally been represented as medieval, unruly, murderous and warlike (Fowler 2007), Paraguay persistently figures as ‘languid and insular, Edenic and apocalyptic, exotic and erotically charged’ (Fowler 2013, 62). Moreover, travel writers demonstrably project their own societal anxieties and preoccupations onto sites of travel elsewhere (55).