scholarly journals “Prompter’s Whisper”: History, Travel and Narrative in Post-Colonial Indian English Travel Writing

Author(s):  
Komal Yadav ◽  

The theory revolution and the counter-traditional wave in humanities in the 1980s have garnered attention towards new localism by positing alternatives to the great tradition. In this, Travel writing has proved adaptable and responsive to post-colonial and Globalization studies, thereby shaking off its ‘middlebrow’ status. Keeping in mind the relevance of travel writing in Global politics, the paper aims to engage with In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveller’s Tale (1992) by Amitav Ghosh to delineate the question of History, Travel and Narrative in Indian English Travel Writing. The paper contends that Ghosh uses the Hybrid non-fiction space of the travelogue to write a counter-narrative to the Eurocentric discourse of Travel writing. It seeks to foreground that the reverse Grand tour of Amitav Ghosh problematizes the western hegemonic hold on the field of Ethnography and History. The paper is divided into two parts- the first part will establish In an Antique Land as Resistive subaltern history, followed by the second part, which focuses on Ghosh’s privileging of third world ethnography to write an alternative narrative.

Journeys ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-153

Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories of a City Fiona SmythGerald MacLean (ed.), Re-Orienting the Renaissance. Cultural Exchanges with the East Clifford Edmund Bosworth, An Intrepid Scot. William Lithgow of Lanark’s Travels in the Ottoman Lands, North Africa and Central Europe, 1609–21 Alex Drace-FrancisDaniel Carey (ed.), Asian Travel in the Renaissance John E. Wills, Jr.Gerald M. MacLean, The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580–1720 Felipe Fernández-ArmestoDebbie Lisle, The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing Benjamin J. MullerBassam Tayara, Le Japon et les Arabes. La vision du Monde Arabe au Japon, des époques anciennes jusqu’au tournant de Meiji Elisabeth AllèsAlain Roussillon, Identité et Modernité – Les voyageurs égyptiens au Japon Bassam TayaraBenoit de L’Estoile, Federico Neiburg, and Lygia Sigaud (eds.), Empires, Nations, and Natives: Anthropology and State-Making Talal Asad


Author(s):  
Paulo Tiago Bento

Patterns of representation in travel writing, travel guides, journalism and memoir are shown to amount to aesthetic cognition by comparison to social science analogues. Their postmodernity questions the supposed factuality of those genres. Travel writing and travel guides’s expected orientation to the present is contested by how the past is used. The patterns show operational potential for empirical testing of usual temporal boundaries of the postmodern. Finally, they are forms of modern and postmodern cognitive engagement of tourists and would-be tourists with society, complementing major theories of tourist motivation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (11) ◽  
pp. 16
Author(s):  
Dr. Abha Singh

The women’s studies have been receiving increasing academic and disciplinary recognition throughout the globe. The writers are determined to narrate, respond and react to the place of women in society. The purpose of the present paper is to redefine the image of women in post colonial Indian English literature. The post colonial Indian English writers focus on major issues relating to woman such as her awakening to the realization of her individuality, her breaking away with the traditional image. The transformation of the idealized women into an assertive self willed woman, searching and discovering her true self is described by various Indian Writers like Anita Desai, Sashi Deshpande, Nayantara Sahgal, Bharati Mukherjee, Kamla Markandaya, Manju Kapoor and many others have depicted females who are not silent sufferers but have learnt to fight against injustice and humiliation.  


2021 ◽  
Vol 61 (4 (244)) ◽  
pp. 5-16
Author(s):  
Jakub Basista

Early Modern Grand Tourer in Poland-Lithuania. Fiction or Real Possibility? In the last fifty or so years, Grand Tour has become a very popular and extensively researched phenomenon. Although mainstream researchers have analyzed various aspects of the Grand Tour, they have tended to adopt a narrow definition limited to the experiences of young English gentlemen undertaking a study tour of Italy and France. This article poses a somewhat provocative question: was the Grand Tour feasible as a study tour of an English gentleman visiting Poland- Lithuania? Based on contemporary travel writing, the author reveals the challenges and the difficult logistics of such an undertaking.  


Author(s):  
Marta Dąbrowska ◽  

Public communication in the contemporary world constitutes a multifaceted phenomenon. The Internet offers unlimited possibilities of contact and public expression, locally and globally, yet exerts its power, inducing use of the Internet lingo, loosening language norms, and encourages the use of a lingua franca, English in particular. This leads to linguistic choices that are liberating for some and difficult for others on ideological grounds, due to the norms of the discourse community, or simply because of insufficient language skills and linguistic means available. Such choices appear to particularly characterise post-colonial states, in which the co-existence of multiple local tongues with the language once imperially imposed and now owned by local users makes the web of repertoires especially complex. Such a case is no doubt India, where the use of English alongside the nationally encouraged Hindi and state languages stems not only from its historical past, but especially its present position enhanced not only by its local prestige, but also by its global status too, and also as the primary language of Online communication. The Internet, however, has also been recognised as a medium that encourages, and even revitalises, the use of local tongues, and which may manifest itself through the choice of a given language as the main medium of communication, or only a symbolic one, indicated by certain lexical or grammatical features as identity markers. It is therefore of particular interest to investigate how members of such a multilingual community, represented here by Hindi users, convey their cultural identity when interacting with friends and the general public Online, on social media sites. This study is motivated by Kachru’s (1983) classical study, and, among others, a recent discussion concerning the use of Hinglish (Kothari and Snell, eds., 2011). This paper analyses posts by Hindi users on Facebook (private profiles and fanpages) and Twitter, where personalities of users are largely known, and on YouTube, where they are often hidden, in order to identify how the users mark their Indian identity. Investigated will be Hindi lexical items, grammatical aspects and word order, cases of code-switching, and locally coloured uses of English words and spelling conventions, with an aim to establish, also from the point of view of gender preferences, the most dominating linguistic patterns found Online.


Author(s):  
Richard Huzzey

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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