This workshop focuses on significant theoretical and methodological developments in the interdisciplinary field of travel studies and reflects the directions that it might take next. We will consider the legacies of the New Historicist and postcolonial approaches which shaped the study of travel in the 1980s and 1990s before turning to the insights and provocations offered by more recent scholarship rooted in feminist, queer, Black, migration, and decolonial studies.
Texts to be discussed:
- Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Beijing to the Bosphorus: notes on the travel account”, India International Centre Quarterly 30 (2003-2004), 89-107.
- April Shemak, “Refugee and Asylum Seeker Narratives as Postcolonial Travel Writing” in The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Travel Writing ed. Robert Clarke (Cambridge, 2018), 188-201.
- Natalya Din-Kariuki and Guido van Meersbergen, “Travel Studies and the Decolonial Turn”, Studies in Travel Writing 27.2 (2024), 77-93.
Participants should read the aforementioned texts, which will be circulated before the workshop. Participants are also expected to briefly introduce their own projects in the field of travel writing or their motivation in participating in the workshop.
Please register by writing an email to florian.deroo@vub.be.