Guest editor: John Culbert

Travel writing as a field of study owes a great deal to “theory” – the critical methodologies that emerged from structuralism and the social movements of the ’60s and ’70s. Theory, in turn, owes a good deal to travel writing, whose hybrid, biographical, and often non-canonical texts were invaluable source materials for those social movements and poststructuralist critical trends. One of the innovations of Edward Said’s landmark Orientalism (1978) was precisely its critical focus on travel writing; in this way the book synthesized broader intellectual concerns about travel, power, desire and discourse in a postcolonial, globalizing world. Over the subsequent years, postcolonial studies, anthropology, cultural studies and literary criticism, among other fields, increasingly drew on travel writing to illuminate the social and political stakes of travel, tourism, and the representation of other cultures – or what a suspicious Paul de Man, still beholden in 1979 to a certain Eurocentric formalism, disparaged as “the foreign affairs, the external politics of literature.”
 
Forty years after Orientalism, this special issue of Studies in Travel Writing reconsiders the place of travel writing in theory, and of theory in the study of travel writing. The editors are especially interested in work that can speak to the political and social stakes of travel and theory in the present historical conjuncture. What are the prospects for theory and what are the stakes of travel writing in a time of mass migrations, social disruptions, ecological crises and shifting geopolitics? Articles must be limited to 7,000 - 10,000 words. Topics may include travel writing and:
 

• Indigenous studies
• Postcolonial studies
• Critical Race Studies
• Queer theory & gender studies
• Ecological studies
• Refugees, migrations and immigration
• Biopolitics and security
• Plasticity
• Cosmopolitanism
• Mobility and disability
• Technology
• World literature

 
Send abstracts of 250 words by September 15, 2017 to jculbert@mail.ubc.ca, with subject heading “Travel and Theory Submission.”

POEMS ABOUT TRAVEL & THE EXPERIENCE OF BEING IN TRANSIT

                               ​– Carolyn Forché, ‘Travel Papers’ (2011)

Whether local or global, by foot or by ferry, we tend to look upon journeys in terms of departure and arrival. However much we enjoy or endure it, travel from one place to another is often understood simply as a means of getting from A to B.

But what happens en route? How are our thoughts set in motion during these journeys? What is the relationship between our inner selves and our surroundings? How do we interact with or ignore our fellow passengers? How does the mode of travel affect our perception of the environment? Do journeys change or confirm us? Are we different beings while travelling? And what happens when we are forced to travel, or when we no choice but to stay put?
​
In Transit is a collaboration between the Emma Press and the Centre for Travel Writing Studies at Nottingham Trent University, edited by Dr Sarah Jackson and Prof. Tim Youngs. ​

​We invite submissions of poems that deal with the experience of being in transit. Poems may describe journeys undertaken on foot, by bicycle, motorcycle, wheelchair, ambulance, bus, train, plane, boat or other mode of transport.

We welcome both formal and experimental work but are especially interested in contributions that employ poetic form to convey the sense of motion.

The deadline for submissions is 28th May 2017. 

Further details and online submission form: 
https://theemmapress.com/about/submissions/