Monday, February 23, 2004

Questions of travel

Travel, as is will be used here, is not referred to only as an equivalent of tourism or leisure travel but does also embrace a variety of forms of displacement: exploration, expatriation, exile, homelessness, and immigration, to name a few. This discourse on displacement includes (and refers to) a concept of placement, dwelling, location, or position. There are plenty of metaphors within postmodern discourse on displacement: exile, tourism, diaspora, nomadism. In this context, a journey does not merely mean a physical dislocation, the concept also includes travels in mind and experiences of liminality. Travel as a metaphor relates to a change in the position of the speaker.
There are different forms of travel which will be discussed briefly, followed by a section on tourism as a special but very significant form of modern travel. Travel literature has developed as a particular genre (but differentiated by languages of the authors/travelers) which shaped the view of the readers/the people "at home" on the foreign places the authors/travelers wrote about/traveled to.
The reasons for traveling are manifold and will be touched upon in this chapter only superficially - there will be a closer examination at a later point. As Clifford notes, travel as a concept is not free of various connotations: it is typically related to (and also very often criticized as) a history of European, literary, male, bourgeois, scientific, heroic, recreational, meanings and practices. But this first world perspective may be changed through a shift in the position of the speaker.

.: posted by BW 3:02 PM