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.