Postcolonial studies have changed literary and cultural studies in many ways and have shed new light on cultural practices, discourses and texts. However, postcolonial studies also do have their blind spots or, rather, their gaps that still ought to be closed. Sarah De Mul identifies and investigates some of these in her comparative study on contemporary women's travel writing in Britain and the Netherlands: first, she shows that contemporary returns by Western women to the colonial past are much more ambivalently shaded than a notion such as Said's Orientalism suggests. Secondly, by applying a comparative perspective, she presents a study in this rather new direction of postcolonial studies. The comparative approach does not only regard the works she analyses, but also her theoretical approach, which is a combination of postcolonial theory and – via the notion of imperial nostalgia – memory studies. This approach enables De Mul to shed light on the ‘complexities and ambivalences surrounding the return to the colonial past in late twentieth-century Britain and the Netherlands and, thus, to refine the methodology of postcolonial studies’ (p. 13) – a task that she clearly succeeds in. Furthermore, De Mul sees the need to add to Said's concept of Orientalism from a feminist perspective. She therefore analyses the relations between women's return to the colonial past in travel writing and discourses on colonial remembrance in Great Britain and in the Netherlands and the discourse of Orientalism incorporated in these negotiations. There is a fourth blind spot of postcolonial studies that De Mul addresses in her book, namely the predominance of the focus on the Anglo-Saxon context. This perceived predominance might also have to do with the way the colonial past is dealt with or, rather, not dealt with in other national contexts. On the other hand, one ought to add that postcolonial studies have also been received and applied to national contexts other than the Anglo-Saxon one. Recently, postcolonial theory has even arrived in regions one does not usually associate with a colonial past, such as Austria or Germany (although the latter does have a colonial history). In these contexts, many concepts stemming from postcolonial studies have been shown to be useful theoretical tools for the analysis of power relations, situations of oppression or current changes of societies. De Mul's focus on Dutch colonialism is intended to counteract the stated Anglo-Saxon prevalence and to show ‘how colonialism has generated various histories, divided legacies and diversified literatures’ (p. 130). In particular, the comparative approach of her study enables her to depict these differences, but, at the same time, it shows how colonial memories from different contexts are interwoven and interact.

The focus of De Mul's work is on what she identifies as a current phenomenon in late 20th-century writing: the return to the colonial past. She concentrates on women's travel writing, i.e. on texts in which women travellers return to the colonial past, a period with which they are, in different ways, autobiographically connected. The study focuses on three works: Aya Zikken's Terug naar de atlasvlinder (Back to the Atlas Butterfly) (1981), Marion Bloem's Muggen Mensen Olifanten (Mosquitoes, People, Elephants) (1995) and Doris Lessing's African Laughter. Four Visits to Zimbabwe (1992). The book is divided into five chapters and a conclusion, each of the travelogues is discussed in a chapter, and the analyses are preceded by two chapters in which De Mul discusses in detail the theoretical basis from which she starts. The author is particularly interested in ‘how these women's return travel narratives relate to other contemporary forms of colonial remembrance in Britain and the Netherlands’ (p. 10), an aspect that accounts for the theoretical combination of postcolonial and memory studies. De Mul offers her readers insights into the colonial historiography of the Dutch East Indies and Rhodesia as she argues that it is shaped by and at the same time shapes women's literary representations of colonial memory. In this discussion, De Mul concentrates on the role and position of women in the Empire – often confined to the domestic sphere – as well as the memory discourses about colonialism, which are often characterised by a nostalgic vision and therefore a notion of loss or rupture.

The detailed readings of the three texts show the heterogeneity of colonial remembrance. At the same time, they raise the question of what degree colonial memory ‘is threatened to transform into a hegemonic language that underlines undeniable cultural differences’ (p. 124). Thus, in Aya Zikken's account, the colonial past is fixated in a narrative of beautiful recollections and anecdotes of empire; Indonesia and its inhabitants are described from an ethnographer's point of view as premodern and sensuous. Marion Bloem's Muggen Mensen Olifanten, on the other hand, is characterised by the traveller's search for a second-generation female Indo identity and, at the same time, the traveller exercises ethnographic authority over Indonesia, although being sensitive to unequal power relations. De Mul describes Doris Lessing's book as an ‘acoustic bricolage’, as in the text Zimbabwean everyday life is rendered through multiple narrators, colloquial discourse, direct and indirect speech and conversational bits and pieces. The first-person narrator, however, does appear every now and then and expresses a clearly Marxist and feminist vision of inevitable progress. In addition, autobiographical memory of colonial everyday life is identified as an important aspect of Lessing's book. De Mul's conclusion from her textual analyses is that women in their travel narratives on the one hand rewrite dominant historical narratives about colonialism, while on the other hand they confirm stereotypes of historical and cultural otherness: in their descriptions, the former colonised spaces as well as the people living there never rise above object status. However, De Mul also sees in the texts productive potential in the deployment of non-mimetic techniques or experimental narrative forms, such as Lessing's ‘acoustic bricolage’. She concludes by referring to postcolonial writers who deploy postmodern techniques as alternatives to realist forms, thereby proposing more experimental forms of representation. She suggests these as possible sources for women in the West in order to narrate their involvement with colonialism and at the same time to present ‘alternative histories, identities and possibilities for transnational alliances’ (p. 128).

Sarah De Mul's book is a theoretically rich and stimulating study, which is an important contribution to (comparative) postcolonial studies, memory studies, feminism and contemporary (women's) travel writing. It offers original insights on the Dutch empire as well as on Dutch and British modes of imperial nostalgia and will be an important source for other studies in the field.