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