scholarly journals Beyond Postcoloniality: Female Subjectivity and Travel in Jamaica Kincaid’s Among Flowers

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Subarna Bhattacharya ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Travel Writing ◽  
Feminist Criticism ◽  
Feminist Studies ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Diasporic Identity ◽  
Women's Travel ◽  
Critical Discourses ◽  
The Himalaya

In feminist studies, the relation between gender and travel has been addressed in many important critical discourses. Feminist critics have pointed out that travel writing had for long remained oblivious about women’s travel, one reason being that travel was, forever, a masculinist exercise. Underlining the gendered aesthetics of travel writing, feminist criticism has read women’s travelogues as interesting sites of struggle between repeating the normative patterns of male travelling and casting an ‘alternative’ gaze. However, reading women’s travel writing simply as feminist narratives against their masculinist counterparts can be an oversimplification, as it may mean ignoring the deeper complexities underlying the texts. Being an autobiographical form, travel writing creates textual spaces where the formation of selfhood happens through a constant negotiation of the ‘self’ with the ‘world’, not only in terms of gender, but also other subject identities like race, class, and culture. In this context, my paper proposes to read Jamaica Kincaid’s Among Flowers. A Walk in the Himalaya (2005), as a female travel writing, where the question of gender intertwines with her non-white, ex-colonial, diasporic identity during her travel in Himalayan Nepal. My focus would be on examining the writer’s narratorial self as a female agency, influencing, and negotiating her postcolonial identity. The paper will try to address how the travelogue functions as a register of female experiences, while Kincaid, as a post-colonial black traveller, negotiates her position within the existing imperialist paradigm of white travelling.

Victorian Women's Travel Writing on Meiji Japan

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomoe Kumojima
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Japanese Literature ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Meiji Japan ◽  
Cultural Contact ◽  
New Imperialism ◽  
Women's Travel

Victorian Women’s Travel Writing on Meiji Japan: Hospitable Friendship explores real-life instances and literary manifestations of cross-cultural friendship between Victorian female travellers and Meiji Japanese, examining its ethico-political significance against the backdrop of British ‘New Imperialism’. Shifting critical focus from the individualist model of subjectivity to affective relationality, Tomoe Kumojima conceptualizes the female travellers’ open subjectivity as hospitable friendship and argues that femininity proves to be an asset in their praxis of more equitable cross-cultural contact in non-colonial Japan. Political affordances of literature are the book’s overarching thread. Kumojima opens new archives of unpublished correspondence and typescripts and introduces contemporary Japanese literature hitherto unavailable in English, shedding a refreshing light on the works of Isabella Bird, Mary Crawford Fraser, and Marie Stopes. The book traverses the themes of identity fluidity, literary afterlife, international female solidarity, literary diplomacy, cross-racial heterosexual intimacy, and cross-gender friendship. It traces the shifts in the representation of Japan in Victorian discourses prompted by Britain’s colonial management, Japan’s successful modernization, the Anglo-Japanese bilateral relationship, and global geopolitics, demonstrating how the women travellers complicated and challenged Oriental stereotypes and imperial binaries by creating counter-discourses through their literary activities. Kumojima also offers parallel narratives of three Meiji female pioneers in Britain and burgeoning transnational feminist alliances. The book addresses the absence of Japan in discussions of the British Empire in the field of literary studies and that of women and female agency in the male-dominated historiography of the Anglo-Japanese relationship.

scholarly journals New directions or the end of the road? Women's travel writing at the millennium

2000 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 61
Author(s):  
Maureen Mulligan
Keyword(s):  
Travel Writing ◽  
Environmental Issues ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Writing Project ◽  
The Road ◽  
Terra Incognita ◽  
New Directions ◽  
Women's Travel ◽  
New Literature

Women´s travel writing in the twentieth century can be seen as an area of new literature which both absorbs earlier styles of both male and female travel writing, while developing in the direction of certain discourses which have found strong ideological support in social and literary concerns at the end of the century. The key discursive trends in post-colonial women’s travel writing can be defined as those of feminism, (anti)-tourism, ‘tough’ travel, post-colonial awareness, and concern for certain environmental issues. In this paper we will consider how these trends are reflected or challenged in some recent examples of women’s travel writing. The texts referred to here offer a range of positions and concerns which in some ways suggest the limits and possibilities of contemporary travel writing. Without wishing to reduce the books discussed to a single interpretative position, it may be helpful to highlight two differing approaches to the continuing problem of how to write about the Other and how to represent oneself and one’s own culture in the process. Desert Places by Robyn Davidson (1996) is considered in terms of its author’s loss of conviction in the travel writing project; and Terra Incognita by Sara Wheeler (1996) in terms of travel as an interior, imaginative venture into a landscape of myth and emptiness.

scholarly journals Women’s travel writing in the cyber-world – ecofeminist and difference feminist approaches in travel blogs

Feminismo/s ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 181
Author(s):  
Mirja Riggert
Keyword(s):  
Travel Writing ◽  
Role Models ◽  
Female Identity ◽  
Symbolic Order ◽  
Gendered Spaces ◽  
Female Role ◽  
Mother Nature ◽  
Female Authority ◽  
Travel Discourse ◽  
Women's Travel

This paper intends to track the development of traditional feminist ideas through the analysis of three contemporary travel blogs. These traditional feminist concepts are to be seen in the construction of a collective female identity that enables transnational and transgenerational solidarity: by receiving and transmitting inspiration, shelter and encouragement among female travellers, the narrators in the blogs create a system of female authority. Within this system, female role models as well as maternal figures become points of reference that help to revalue female attributes. This concept shows allusions to the theory of difference feminism as it is presented in the «symbolic order of the mother» by Luisa Muraro. A similar approach of revaluating femininity happens through the orientation towards ‘Mother Nature’. By staging women’s ability to give birth, cultural ecofeminists like Susan Griffin intend to affirm a close bond between women and nature. This representation of an emphasised femininity becomes a central marker in the narratives of the blogs. While this agenda might be designed to counter gendered spaces and the traditional alienation of women within travel discourse, it is problematised by exclusionary and essentialist definitions of femininity that harden engendered binaries like masculinity/femininity or nature/culture.

scholarly journals Understanding Currents and Theories in Indian and African Postcolonial Literature: Themes, Tropes and Discourse in the Wider Context of Postcolonialism

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 379-393
Author(s):  
Shivani Ekkanath
Keyword(s):  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Postcolonial Literature ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Colonial Literature ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Diasporic Identity ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Diaspora And Transnationalism

The postcolonial narratives we see today are a study in contrast and tell a different tale from their colonial predecessors as minorities and individuals finally have found the voice and position to tell their stories. Histories written about our culture and societies have now found a new purpose and voice. The stories we have passed down from generation to generation through both oral and written histories, continue to morph and change with the tide of time as they re-centre our cultural narratives and shared experiences. As a result, the study of diaspora and transnationalism have altered the way in which we view identity in different forms of multimedia and literature. In this paper, the primary question which will be examined is, how and to what extent does Indian post-colonial literature figure in the formation of identity in contemporary art and literature in the context of ongoing postcolonial ideas and currents? by means of famous and notable postcolonial literary works and theories of Indian authors and theoreticians, with a special focus on the question and notion of identity. This paper works on drawing parallels between themes in Indian and African postcolonial literary works, especially themes such as power, hegemony, east meets west, among others. In this paper, European transnationalism will also be analysed as a case study to better understand postcolonialism in different contexts. The paper will seek to explore some of the gaps in the study of diasporic identity and postcolonial studies and explore some of the changes and key milestones in the evolution of the discourse over the decades.

An Anthology of Women's Travel Writing

2005 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 311-336
Author(s):  
Emma Liggins
Keyword(s):  
Travel Writing ◽  
Women's Travel

Manifest Dominion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Huzzey
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
North West ◽  
Imperial Authority ◽  
Competing Interests ◽  
Political Commentary ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Pacific

This chapter analyses how Britons responded to the febrile political and social crises of the Americas in the 1860s. Although the American Civil War created a particular challenge – and great confusion – to observers in the United Kingdom, that conflict was one of a wider range of concerns in balancing the demands of rival imperial and new post-colonial powers to preserve British influence. Considering opinions expressed travel writing and political commentary, the chapter argues that Britons struggled to balance competing interests – in economic affairs, in geopolitical strategy, in imperial authority, and in suppression of the slave trade – to maintain a manifestly uncertain dominion over the Americas. Touching on British concerns stretching from the Mosquito Coast to the Pacific north--west, the chapter suggests that crises in the Americas illuminated diverse priorities and anxieties.

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