In Culture and Imperialism (1994 [1993]) Edward Said theorizes a ‘contrapuntal’ reading practice whereby the critic interprets a text with a ‘simultaneous awareness’ of both colonial and counter-colonial themes (see colonialism). Distinct from comparative reading, this method specifically allows an ‘alternate privileging’ and interplay of these themes, in a manner similar to counterpoint in music. The intention is to destabilize the hierarchy frequently perpetuated by readings that obscure counterimperial voices. Said's earlier text, Orientalism (1995 [1978]), was criticized as an example of such a reading (Porter 1983; Ahmad 1992). His development of counterpoint in Culture and Imperialism is part of his response to such criticism. As Catherine McGlennan-Martin (2001, 45) states, Said's definition of counterpoint remains hazy, and no working model for a contrapuntal approach is actually provided (52–53). Said reads Jane Austen's Mansfield Park from the point of view of the Bertram's Antigua plantation, which suggests that contrapuntal reading requires only a single text (Said 1994 [1993], 69–70). However, elsewhere in Culture and Imperialism, he implies that texts should be read together (see McGlennan-Martin 2001, 43–44). Despite this, both methods implicitly advanced by Said can be drawn upon productively in critical approaches to travel literature, and indeed to other texts, produced in colonial and post-independence contexts.

A contrapuntal reading, in such contexts, might involve a direct comparison of contemporaneous narratives of journeys by travellers from a former imperial ‘centre’ or ‘periphery’. Alternatively, a single text can be analysed in the light of representations of journeys which evidence a different history of empire and travel at the same historical moment, following the method suggested by Said's reading of Austen's Mansfield Park. Such readings might explore journeys in opposite directions, or along the same vector – southward or northward. They highlight the specificity of the notion and experience of travel for those from former colonies, raising questions as to whether the journeys of immigrants, exiles or refugees can be called ‘travel’, and how the landscapes and people they depict renegotiate the familiar tropes of ‘exoticism’ (see exotic). Either contrapuntal reading method enables a mutual illumination of alternative, yet ‘intertwined’, European and non-European histories and representations of colonialism and the journeys on which this depended.