In Textual Traffic, S. Shankar clarifies notions of modernity and postmodernity by lucidly examining their relationship to colonialism. In the process, he challenges current emphases in cultural criticism through an exploration of what it means to regard the text as an economy and carries out a detailed scrutiny of travel narratives as a genre. Paying particular attention to representations of Africa and India, Shankar tracks the historical contours of a colonial modernity in a wide variety of travel narratives--African-American and postcolonial, canonical and filmic--drawn from different periods of the twentieth century. Included are explorations of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men, Richard Wright's Black Power, V. S. Naipaul's India trilogy, and Stephen Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.