CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland
The Discourse of Travel in a Portable Age
Organisers: Paul Smethurst
Magee, Paul (University of Technology,
Sydney, Australia) DOMESTIC TRAVEL AND THE WORLD'S OF COOKBOOKS
This paper addresses the portability of culture. It does not analyse travel per
se, but rather cooking. I am going to suggest that the usage of cookbooks such
as Claudia Roden's Middle Eastern Food, and Kenneth Hom's Chinese Cookery
constitute a curious ethnographic act. By codifying the set of operations that
give rise to the culinary products of a foreign culture, such literature
effectively transports culture - itself nothing but code - to us. Given that
dining is one of the central modes of cultural experience, this is as much as to
say that people experienced 'virtual travel' well before computers and modems.
Through a socio-historical study of the modern, predominantly feminine,
phenomenon of the cookbook, I argue that Cultural Studies is only beginning to
tap the surface of 'virtual reality' and what it might mean to the analysis of
present and past experience. I conclude with a consideration of how such
internet-inflected analyses might inform our theories of actual physical travel.
Melo, Sónia (Instituto Politécnico de
Leiria, Portugal) TRAVEL WRITING IN A POST-COLONIAL AND POST-MODERN ERA: THE
CASE OF V.S. NAIPAUL
For centuries, traveller writers were a privileged group, mostly westerners,
whose main function was to report on the habits and culture of others. Such
information often played a significant role in military and strategic matters.
In the 19th century, for example, encounters with the 'Other' had particular
interest for the European colonial powers. Richard Burton and T. E. Lawrence may
have had strong personal reasons for travelling, such as the desire for
challenge and adventure, and escape from Victorian conventions, but their
travels into territory unknown or unfamiliar to Europeans was invariably linked
to imperialist aspirations. In times of mass tourism, Internet, and spy
satellites the traveller's first-hand knowledge of peoples or places is greatly
diminished. What, then, is the point of travelling in a postcolonial and
postmodern world, when all that is available is the fleeting and superficial
experience of tourism? For Lash and Urry, there is a counter-movement to the
annihilation of temporal and spatial barriers in postmodernity. They argue that
the more global interrelations become, the more people search for a space and a
place to belong. In this paper, I will focus on how the writer V.S. Naipaul
tackles the complex questions of identity in this context.
Smethurst, Paul (University of Hong
Kong, Hong Kong, China) GLOBALITY AND TRAVEL WRITING: JAN MORRIS, BILL BRYSON
AND PICO IYER
It seems inevitable that globalisation will have an impact on the experience of
place and the representation of place in travel literature. The effects of
globalisation are found in the de-differentiation of place, placelessness and
loss of authenticity in place. In the globality that emerges, place is
transformed into representational phenomena, no longer rooted in local cultural
practice and history. In globality, simulation and ‘other-directedness’
recall places situated elsewhere, nowhere, or in some abstract idea or fantasy.
Sometimes there is an intensification of locality, but this appears as
simulacrum places transformed into empty signifiers or clichés of themselves.
Paradoxically, the nostalgia for rootedness replaces substance with the aura of
place, its representational, or rather, its ‘having been represented’
qualities.
Nilsson, Maria (University of Iowa, USA)
GOING NOWHERE: A PHOTOGRAPHIC CRITIQUE OF CONTEMPORARY TRAVEL PRACTICES AND
TRAVEL PHOTOGRAPHY
Photography and contemporary travel are intrinsically connected. Yet, cultural
studies has only begun to examine politics of representation in travel
photography and the ways the medium figures in travel practices as a tool for
"capturing" and validating a trip. This paper, which addresses travel
practices as well as representation, focuses on three photography books by
Martin Parr, a British photographer known for his satirical work on global
tourism, leisure and consumer culture. My thesis is that photography is an
overlooked form of cultural critique and that Parr's work, as a critique of
global tourism, effectively subverts the codes of representation and topics of
commercial travel photography, and in doing so exposes the commodification of
tourist sites, host cultures and travellers. While the relationship between
photographer and subjects - leisure travellers - is unequal in the first two
books, Parr becomes the tourist in a book of studio travel portraits.
Dissanayake, Wimal (University of Hong
Kong, Hong Kong) TRAVEL WRITING, POSTCOLONIAL WRITERS AND NARRATIVE AUTHORITY
Some years ago, a commentator in his introduction to a special issue of the
journal Ariel devoted to travel literature observed that, travel writing is
essentially a Western genre. If it is indeed the case, the situation is changing
very rapidly. Writers from the non-Western world are increasingly using the
space of travel writing as a mode of self-enuciation and cultural exploration.
In the process, they are also seeking to extend the discursive boundaries and
semantic horizons of the form, and in some cases, to subvert it from within. In
my paper, I wish to focus on a number of writers such as Nirad Chaudhuri, R.K.
Narayan, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Bharati Mukherjee, and Pico Iyer, all of
whom are directly linked to India, and the Nobel laureate, V.S. Naipaul, who is
separated from India by three generations. One interesting facet of travel
literature is the complex ways in which different authors have sought to acquire
and display a sense of narrative authority. This involves questions of
epistemological viewpoints, structuring devices, deployment of tropes,
ideological manipulations and other rhetorical moves. In the case of
postcolonial writers, such as the ones mentioned above, narrative authority is
complexly linked to their postcolonial experience and heritage as well as to
strategies of self-authentication, performative syntax of reassertion,
engagements with historical contingency, challenges to colonial interpellations,
and repossession of agency and gaze. Indeed, postcoloniality becomes a condition
of possibility for their textualities and a source of narrative authority. My
paper will explore these intersecting issues and how they are imbricated with
the larger project of re-imagining and re-conceptualising the genre of travel
writing itself.
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