The Global Politics Of Contemporary Travel Writing

This book brings the 'serious' world of politics to the 'superficial' world of contemporary travel writing.

With its specific focus on the connections between politics, travel, and travel writing, Not So Innocent Abroad offers a fresh approach to the study of travel literature. The authors make clear that travel and travel writing are never an “innocent” enterprise; rather, journeying always occurs within political systems, and travel writing either reflects the traveler’s political stance, includes political aspects of foreign cultures, or directly or indirectly influences political decisions. In contrast to most scholarly publications that primarily focus on travel literature of former colonial nations, this volume includes a broader range of travelogues depicting cultures worldwide, spanning from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. It thus offers with its comparative approach not only a geographically wide selection but also an historical dimension to the political aspects of travel writing. Although most travel literature generally has followed the Horatian principle to instruct and delight the armchair traveler, the authors of this volume clearly address the broader political implications of travel and travel writing within networks of “naked” politics, such as international or interior conflicts, emigration laws, or national propaganda. They also reveal how insidiously political messages are dissimulated through travel writing.

Table of contents

The nexus between travel, writing and media in the contemporary world is dense: travel practice is increasingly interwoven with media; representations in old and new media are co-present and converge. Digitisation has had a profound impact on the practice and mediation of travel, but this volume aims to show that travel and its representation have always been enlaced with media. With contributions by experts in literary and cultural studies, journalism studies and informatics, the book takes a multi- and interdisciplinary approach and covers a wide range of media, from the hand-crafted album to social media. It illustrates how current transformations invite us to revisit earlier periods of travel writing and their media environments, and to explore the ways in which contemporary forms of mediation are prefigured by earlier practices and forms. The book addresses readers interested in travel writing, travel studies and cultural studies. Chapters Introduction, 3, 7 and 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license. Funded by University of Freiburg.

Despite the recent increase in scholarly activity regarding travel writing and the accompanying proliferation of publications relating to the form, its ethical dimensions have yet to be theorized with sufficient rigour. Drawing from the disciplines of anthropology, linguistics, literary studies and modern languages, the contributors in this volume apply themselves to a number of key theoretical questions pertaining to travel writing and ethics, ranging from travel-as-commoditization to encounters with minority languages under threat. Taken collectively, the essays assess key critical legacies from parallel disciplines to the debate so far, such as anthropological theory and postcolonial criticism. Also considered, and of equal significance, are the ethical implications of the form’s parallel genres of writing, such as ethnography and journalism. As some of the contributors argue, innovations in these genres have important implications for the act of theorizing travel writing itself and the mode and spirit in which it continues to be conducted. In the light of such innovations, how might ethical theory maintain its critical edge?

This collection examines the intersections between the personal and the political in travel writing, and the dialectic between mobility and stasis, through an analysis of specific cases across geographical and historical boundaries. The authors explore the various ways in which travel texts represent actual political conditions and thus engage in discussions about national, transnational, and global citizenship; how they propose real-world political interventions in the places where the traveler goes; what tone they take toward political or socio-political violence; and how they intersect with political debates. Travel writing can be viewed as political in a purely instrumental sense, but, as this volume also demonstrates, travel writing’s reception and ideological interventions also transform personal and cultural realities. This book thus examines the ways in which politics’ material effects inform and intersect with personal experience in travel texts and engage with travel’s dialectic of mobility and stasis. In spite of globalization and efforts to eradicate the colonial vision in travel writing and in travel writing criticism, this vision persists in various and complex ways. While the travelogue can be a space of discursive and direct oppression, these essays suggest that the travelogue is also a narrative space in which the traveler employs the genre to assert authority over his or her experiences of mobility. This book will be an important contribution for interdisciplinary scholars with interests in travel writing studies, global and transnational studies, women’s studies, multicultural studies, the social sciences, and history.

This Companion addresses an exciting emerging field of literary scholarship that charts the intersections of postcolonial studies and travel writing.

This book takes a new approach to travel writing about Latin America by examining ‘domestic’ journey narratives that have been produced by travellers from the continent itself and largely in Spanish. Historically, travel writing about Latin America has been written primarily from the perspective of the foreign, often European, traveller. As such, and following the large influx of military, scientific, and leisure travellers in the region since its colonisation, much of this foreign travel writing has depicted the continent in predominantly exoticist and/or imperialist terms. Lindsay explores how Latin American travellers have conceived and constructed narratives about travel at home and considers how such texts (many of them available in English translation or with subtitles) function to counter or corroborate long-standing myths about the continent. Through a series of regionally- and thematically-oriented case studies that engage with key issues, themes and debates in both Latin American and travel studies, Lindsay provides the first sustained interdisciplinary study of contemporary domestic travel narratives about the region and will also comprise an important intervention into methodological debates about travel and travel writing.