Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Travel Revisited
- 1 Travelling with the Ondaatje Bros.
- 2 Amitav Ghosh and Caryl Phillips: Global Travel, Then and Now
- 3 Unhomely Travels; or, the Haunts of Daphne Marlatt and W. G. Sebald
- 4 The World, My City: Home Grounds and Global Cities
- 5 Travel Histories – From Kuala Lumpur to Istanbul and Beyond
- Postscript: Still Mobile
- Bibliography
- Index
Postscript: Still Mobile
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Travel Revisited
- 1 Travelling with the Ondaatje Bros.
- 2 Amitav Ghosh and Caryl Phillips: Global Travel, Then and Now
- 3 Unhomely Travels; or, the Haunts of Daphne Marlatt and W. G. Sebald
- 4 The World, My City: Home Grounds and Global Cities
- 5 Travel Histories – From Kuala Lumpur to Istanbul and Beyond
- Postscript: Still Mobile
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Critical studies of contemporary travel writing have a tendency to end on a note of impending doom, declaring the imminent demise of travel as well as travel writing. Some of these dire predictions assert that travel writing is dead and buried, lost forever to tourism, travel's distant and less interesting cousin (Fussell). Others diagnose travel as terminally ill, but not quite dead. This is either because we might still discover alterity somewhere deep in the Amazon, or because travel continues to take on new and extreme forms (Huggan). Still others declare that the genre is alive and well, but only due to a nostalgic longing for empires that have been lost. Such claims see travel writing as a genre that is doomed to repeat politically problematic images of colonization, racism and exoticism (Lisle).
The purpose of this book is to suggest something quite different. We have argued that globalization and (post)modernity have not lead to the death of travel. On the contrary, the increase in mobility and communication through jet travel, mass tourism and the internet have engendered new kinds of travel and, by extension, new ways of articulating and understanding travel. The issue is not where we travel, but how. Thus, we have tried to show how travel writing can – in its innovative forms – be employed as a means for enabling rather than stifling voices that actively challenge the politics of Empire.
This book, then, has been intended as a contribution to the critical discussions of textuality and political positioning in travelwriting studies. We began the book by delineating a gap in the critical literature and identifying a theoretical challenge: to examine how experimental writings – innovative travel texts – might articulate progressive political positions (outside the parameters of colonial discourse) through unique aesthetic and textual strategies. We also pointed to the fact that, over the last two decades, the genre of travel writing has undergone a tremendous boom, with best-selling travel texts by international celebrities sold alongside more obscure (even difficult) travel texts by both major and minor writers of literary fiction and poetry. The travel texts we have looked at in this book are especially revealing examples of the complexities of texts that interrogate the aesthetics of the travelling subject and self-narration in the context of increasingly accessible forms of mobility.
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- Mobility at LargeGlobalization, Textuality and Innovative Travel Writing, pp. 198 - 202Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012