scholarly journals The Politics of Travel: The Travel Memoirs of Mirza Sheikh I’tesamuddin and Sake Dean Mahomed

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. p66
Author(s):  
Amrita Satapathy

Representation of the East in 18th century western travel narratives was an outcome of a European aesthetic sensibility that thrived on imperial jingoism. The 18th century Indian travel writings proved that East could not be discredited as “exotic” and “orientalist” or its history be judged as a “discourse of curiosity”. The West had its share of mystery that had to be unravelled for the curious visitor from the East. Dean Mahomed’s The Travels of Dean Mahomed is a fascinating travelogue cum autobiography of an Indian immigrant as an insider and outsider in India, Ireland and England. I’tesamuddin’s The Wonders of Vilayet is a travel-memoir that addresses the politics of representation. These 18th century travelographies demystify “vilayet” in more ways than one. They analyse the West from a variety of tropes from gender, to religion and racism to otherness and identity. This paper attempts a comparative analyses of the two texts from the point of view of 18th century travel writing and representations through the idea of journey. It seeks to highlight the concept of “orientalism in reverse” and show how memoirs can be read as counterbalancing textual responses to counteract dominant western voices.

Author(s):  
JoEllen DeLucia

A regular feature of eighteenth-century periodicals, travel narratives allowed magazine readers to imagine their relationship to the world outside of Britain. Via detailed accounts of a range of serialised, excerpted and abridged travel writings in the Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832), JoEllen DeLucia’s essay reveals the role mediation and magazine culture played in producing readers’ sense of women as both self-interested members of the British Empire. Reading texts such as the magazine’s serialisation of Cook’s voyages and the Embassy of Lord Macartney alongside oriental tales and exotic fashion plates, the chapter argues that, on the one hand, travel writing made the world a smaller place, while on the other, its discussions of global politics and theories of good governance, extended the parameters of the feminine sphere. In examining the complex horizontal identifications that magazine travel narratives fostered, DeLucia concludes that women’s magazines present an alternative to the well-worn scripts we have developed about women readers that revolve around the domestic and often very English novel.


2015 ◽  
pp. 57-61
Author(s):  
Oksana L. Tereshkina

Studying of the interpretation of the West European art by the pensioners of the Academy of Arts is an analysis of the interpretation’s components: the choice of art directions, styles and schools; the preference of their personal attitude; the assessment of a specific piece of art; the terminology as an indicator of their either professional or amateur position. The choice of art directions depended on the system of art views existing in the Academy of Arts in the second half of the 18th century. The Academy focused the attention of its students on the art of Antiquity, Renaissance and Classicism. Nevertheless, the pensioners spoke well on the works of Baroque. They used to prefer the art of old masters to the modern art. The specialization of a pensioner illustrated their assessment of the masterpieces. The professional terminology helped to make the description and assessment. The advent of treatises on the art in Russia made possible using the terminology.


Journeys ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-106
Author(s):  
Imene Gannouni Khemiri

Recently, there has been an upsurge of interest in travel writing, postcolonialism, and landscape politics. However, studies of travel writing addressing the notion of the picturesque have not yet explored the idea of aesthetic sensibility in British travel narratives in the Regency of Tunis. This article examines the aesthetics of the picturesque in three British travel accounts: Grenville Temple’s Excursions in the Mediterranean: Algiers and Tunis (1835); Robert Lambert Playfair’s Travels in the Footsteps of Bruce in Algeria and Tunis (1877); and Henry Spencer Ashbee and Alexander Graham’s Travels in Tunisia (1887). These travelers used the picturesque in different but interlinked ways; they oscillated between finding the uncanny landscape an object of delight where it conformed to British aesthetic doctrine and an object of derision where they noted aesthetic deficiencies. By the turn of the nineteenth century, this picturesque way of seeing shifted into an Orientalist desire for “Otherness.”


Author(s):  
Jitamanyu Das ◽  

Fifteenth-century Italian travel narratives on India by Nicolò dei Conti and Gerolamo di Santo Stefano present a detailed account of the India they visited, following the narrative tradition of the Italian Marco Polo. These narratives of the Renaissance were published as descriptive authorial texts of travellers to the East. Their importance was due to the authors’ detailed first-hand experiences of the societies and cultures that they encountered, as well as the various trade centres of the period. These narratives were utilised by merchants, explorers, and Jesuits for a variety of purposes. The narratives of Nicolò dei Conti and Gerolamo di Santo Stefano thus became indispensable tools that were later distorted through numerous translations to suit the politics of Orientalism for the emerging colonial enterprises. In my paper, I have attempted a re-reading of the particular texts to identify how Italy saw India, while illustrating through their history of publication the transformation that these narratives underwent later in order to objectify India in the West through the lens of Orientalism in their manner of representation.


Author(s):  
Eleanor Bell

Reflecting on her experiences of the Cairngorms in The Living Mountain (written 1940s, published 1977), Nan Shepherd writes, 'Here then may be lived a life … so untouched by any mode of apprehension but their own, that the body may be said to think. Each sense heightened to its most exquisite awareness, is in itself total experience.' For Shepherd, the ‘total experience’ offered by the mountains opened up deeper channels of the self. This chapter reflects on certain aspects of the gendered nature of the genre. In doing so, it will make specific parallels between the work of Shepherd and Kathleen Jamie, both travel writers and Scottish poets, whose texts although produced over half a century apart, are united in their questioning of their natural entitlement to place. Yet Jamie has also been very realistic about the genre, critical of its inherent masculine bias. For Jamie, the spiritual aspects of travel writing have to be continually renegotiated, their cultural, social and political dimensions taken into account. In comparing Shepherd’s The Living Mountain and a selection of Jamie’s travel writings, this chapter examines the social and cultural context of each writer’s spiritual and feminist quest, illuminating, in turn, their own particular ‘findings’.


Transfers ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 146-166
Author(s):  
Johannes Görbert ◽  
Russ Pottle ◽  
Jeff Morrison ◽  
Pramod K. Nayar ◽  
Dirk Göttsche ◽  
...  

German Literary Anthropology: Across Cultures, Across Genres Stefan Hermes and Sebastian Kaufmann, eds., Der ganze Mensch – die ganze Menschheit: Völkerkundliche Anthropologie, Literatur und Ästhetik um 1800 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 318 pp., 10 illustrations, €89.95What’s Old Is New Again, Mostly Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst, eds., New Directions in Travel Writing Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 325 pp., $90Complex Journeys around the World and through Literary and Intellectual Traditions around 1800 Johannes Görbert, Die Vertextung der Welt: Forschungsreisen als Literatur bei Georg Forster, Alexander von Humboldt und Adelbert von Chamisso. Weltliteraturen/World Literatures, Schriftenreihe der Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenschule für literaturwissenschaftliche Studien, vol. 7 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), vi, 426 pp., 8 illustrations, €109.95Travel as Cultural Work Gary Totten, African American Travel Narratives from Abroad: Mobility and Cultural Work in the Age of Jim Crow (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), 170 pp., $26.95Colonial Encounters between Africa and Europe—with Special Reference to Austria and Switzerland Manuel Menrath, ed., Afrika im Blick: Afrikabilder im deutschsprachigen Europa, 1870–1970 (Zurich: Chronos, 2012), 329 pp., €43Social Formations and Literary Forms in Long Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing Mary Henes and Brian H. Murray, eds., Travel Writing, Visual Culture and Form, 1760–1900 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 248 pp., 21 illustrations, $95Travel Accounts of Polar Regions and Colonial Discourse Mike Frömel, Off ene Räume und gefährliche Reisen im Eis: Reisebeschreibungen über die Polarregionen und ein kolonialer Diskurs im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2013), 288 pp., €29.50.“Imagined Geographies” and the Navigation of British European Identity Katarina Gephardt, Th e Idea of Europe in British Travel Narratives, 1789–1914 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 248 pp., 15 illustrations, $104.95Terminal and Threshold: Experiencing the Airport Christopher Schaberg, Th e End of Airports (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 216 pp., 25 illustrations, £13.99NOVEL REVIEW Finding Purity Jonathan Franzen, Purity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 563 pp., $28


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Ravindra Ranaware

The present paper aims at exploration of Shauna Singh Baldwin’s specific technique implemented to present women predicament in selected stories from feministic point of view. The feministic point of view has developed out of a movement for equal rights and chances for women society. The present search is based on analytical and interpretative methods. Shauna Singh Baldwin is a writer of short fiction, poetry, novels and essays. Her ‘English Lessons and Other Stories’ explores the predicament of earlier neglected women of Sikh community by putting them in the context of globalization, immigration to West and consumerism at Indian modern society. “Montreal 1962” presents a Sikh wife’s attachment, love, determination, struggles and readiness to do anything for survival in Canada where her husband is threatened to remove his turban and cut his hair short to get the job. “Simran” presents the story of sacrifice of individual desire by a young Sikh girl because of her mother’s fundamentalist attitude. The title of story “English Lessons” presents injustice to an Indian woman who has married to an American, who compels her to become a prostitute and a source of his earnings in the States. The fourth selected story “Jassie” tells us about the timely need of religious tolerance in the file of an Indian immigrant old woman. Being a feminist writer, though Baldwin has never claimed directly to be, she has very skillfully presented the issues of feminism through her own technique of presentation. She has used technique of presenting absence or opposite to highlight it indirectly. Thus, true to her technique, though not explicitly declared, Baldwin is one of the feminist writers who skillfully deals with feminine concerns.


1997 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain Provan

It is well known that the seeds from which the modern discipline of OT theology grew are already found in 17th and 18th century discussion of the relationship between Bible and Church, which tended to drive a wedge between the two, regarding canon in historical rather than theological terms; stressing the difference between what is transient and particular in the Bible and what is universal and of abiding significance; and placing the task of deciding which is which upon the shoulders of the individual reader rather than upon the church. Free investigation of the Bible, unfettered by church tradition and theology, was to be the way ahead. OT theology finds its roots more particularly in the 18th century discussion of the nature of and the relationship between Biblical Theology and Dogmatic Theology, and in particular in Gabler's classic theoreticalstatementof their nature and relationship. The first book which may strictly be called an OT theology appeared in 1796: an historical discussion of the ideas to be found in the OT, with an emphasis on their probable origin and the stages through which Hebrew religious thought had passed, compared and contrasted with the beliefs of other ancient peoples, and evaluated from the point of view of rationalistic religion. Here we find the unreserved acceptance of Gabler's principle that OT theology must in the first instance be a descriptive and historical discipline, freed from dogmatic constraints and resistant to the premature merging of OT and NT — a principle which in the succeeding century was accepted by writers across the whole theological spectrum, including those of orthodox and conservative inclination.


2014 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 683-698 ◽  
Author(s):  
KOSUKE SHIMIZU

AbstractCulture is a demanding word, particularly when it is used in the context of the contemporary academic discipline of international relations (IR). It is often employed in order to distinguish one identity from another, allegedly illuminating idiosyncrasies embedded in a particular society or group of people. The essentialized understanding of culture is also detectable in the case of the current debate on the non-Western international relations theories (IRT). Non-Western politicians and scholars often employ the term culture in order to distinguish their values from alleged Western values. However, culture has another important function mainly advanced by a left-wing Kyoto School philosopher Tosaka Jun, that is, culture as a mirror for critical reflection for morality (Tosaka, 1966). This article is based on Tosaka's argument that culture has an important function for moral reflection beyond that of a mere means to identify one's distinctiveness from the West, and it criticizes Japan's soft power diplomacy or the total absence of it from that point of view. It also argues that this absence is the result of the soft power discourse's over-simplified interpretation of culture that results in confrontation between the West and the rest, particularly when it is employed in non-Western IRT discourses. Towards the end, I examine Miyazaki Hayao's films,Princes Mononokein particular, as examples of cultural works facilitating a moment of critical reflection, and I extract embedded messages of relevance to critical reflection on contemporary IR literature, particularly non-Western literature.


Organization ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 330-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrizia Zanoni ◽  
Annelies Thoelen ◽  
Sierk Ybema

Much literature on the cultural industries celebrates ethnicity as a source of creativity. Despite its positive connotation, this discourse reduces ethnic minority creatives to manifestations of a collective ethnic identity automatically leading to creativity, creating a paradox of creativity without a creative subject. Approaching creatives with an ethnic minority background as agents, this article investigates how they self-reflectively and purposely discursively construct ethnicity as a source of creativity in their identity work. Empirically, we analyze interviews with well-established creatives with an ethnic minority background active in Belgium. Most respondents construct their ethnic background as ‘hybrid’, ‘exotic’, or ‘liminal’ to craft an identity as creatives and claim creativity for their work. Only few refuse to discursively deploy ethnicity as a source of creativity, crafting more individualized identities as creatives. Our study contributes to the literature on power and ethnicity in the creative industries by documenting ethnic minority creatives’ discursive micro-struggle over what is creative work and who qualifies as a creative. Specifically, we show their counterpolitics of representation of ethnicity in the creative industries through the re-signification of the relation between the ‘west’ and the ‘other’ in less disadvantageous terms. Despite such re-signification, the continued relevance of the discourse of ethnicity as a key marker of difference suggests that ethnicity remains a principle of unequal organization of the creative industries.


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