Book Reviews

Randy Malamud, The Importance of Elsewhere: The Globalist Humanist Tourist. Chicago/Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 2018, vii + 236 pp., ISBN-13: 978-1783208746, $29.50 (paperback).Mark Rice, Making Machu Picchu: The Politics of Tourism in Twentieth Century Peru (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), xvi + 253 pp., ISBN 978-1-4696-4353-3, $28.75 (paperback).Jeffrey Mather, Twentieth-Century Literary Encounters in China: Modernism, Travel, and Form (New York: Routledge, 2020), ix + 182 pp., ISBN 978-1-03-208815-0, US $48.95 (paperback).

Bruce Chatwin

This article is an attempt to answer the question Bruce Chatwin posed in the title of the last book published during his life: What Am I Doing Here. A critical focus on Chatwin’s masterwork, The Songlines, and its exploration of nomadism paired with wandering, leads to an exploration of his lifelong quest for spiritual renewal and ascension. Part literary criticism, part personal essay, the article makes personal connections with Chatwin’s life and work. Included here are several book lists, featuring an extensive list of books that Chatwin read and references in his own writing, assembled possibly for the first time.

Mobility and Identity in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss

This article explores the interconnections between mobility and identity as portrayed in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006). In the past, mobility, especially forced or diasporic, was perceived as enveloping the migrant’s identity with a sense of alienation and nostalgia. In the present, however, it is often viewed as facilitating flexibility and a pluralistic worldview entailing intermingled cultures. While examining the interrelation between mobility and identity, this article evaluates the way in which Desai portrays conflicts and tension between two worlds, inhabited by legal natives and illegal migrants, as well as illegal natives and legal migrants.

John Allen Chau and the Designative Authority of Martyrdom

This article describes two journeys. The first is the journey undertaken by Christian missionary John Allen Chau to North Sentinel Island, where he planned to preach the Christian gospel to the island’s inhabitants despite the fact that they have been cut off from the outside world for sixty thousand years. Chau’s efforts ended in his death at the hands of the islanders. The second journey recounted in the article is that from missionary to saint undertaken following Chau’s death. The article examines several issues related to certain philosophical problems in respect of the authority required to designate a victim of violent death a martyr or a saint.

‘He States That This is the Most Lovely Building He Has Ever Had the Pleasure of Seeing . . . ’

The travel journal, collecting, and exhibition of objects by museum founder, tea merchant and Member of Parliament Frederick Horniman (1835–1906) in the late nineteenth century demonstrate how material objects exemplify travel writing. Through an examination of objects he collected and later interpreted at the Horniman Free Museum, this article presents a case study of how collecting activities mirror and serve as a form of travel writing. This article presents a new model for understanding, beyond the written word, how travelers can capture the experience of a foreign expedition through the collecting and interpretation of objects.

Book Reviews

Naomi M. Leite, Quetzil E. Castañeda, and Kathleen M. Adams, eds., The Ethnography of Tourism: Edward Bruner and Beyond (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019), ix + 303 pp., ISBN 978-1-4985-1633-4, $95.00 (hardcover)Sergio González Varela, Capoeira, Mobility, and Tourism: Preserving an Afro-Brazilian Tradition in a Globalized World (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019), 184 pp., ISBN 978-1-4985-7032-9, $90 (hardcover)Sarah LeFanu, Something of Themselves: Kipling, Kingsley, Conan Doyle and the Anglo-Boer War (London: Hurst & Co, 2020), viii + 408 pp., ISBN: 978178733098, $29.95 (hardcover)Bryan S.R. Grimwood, Heather Mair, Kelle Caton, and Meghan Muldoon, Tourism and Wellness: Travel for the Good for All? (Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 2018), xxxi+ 218 pp., 978-1-4985-6329-190000, $95 (hardcover)

“Double Critique” and the Sufi Praxis of Travel in Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage and Fatema Mernissi’s Scheherazade Goes West

This article focuses on two twentieth-century Anglophone Arab women writers’ accounts of their travels to “the West”: Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage: From Cairo to America—A Woman’s Journey (1999), and Fatema Mernissi’s Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems (2001). While their engagement with orientalist conceptions of the harem has received some attention, how and why they deploy Sufi texts, concepts, and cosmologies to advance their “double critique” of local and colonial patriarchies has not been subject to a sustained analysis, despite its salience in their travelogues. This article establishes that the Sufi praxis of travel ( safar ) becomes a facilitating framework, and ultimately a methodology derived from culturally grounded ways of knowing and being, for their overdetermined journeys toward what has been called “Islamic feminism.”

“Pretty as a Picture”

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.”

James Bryce’s Political Analysis of Mexico’s Porfirian Regime

This article aims to explore British traveler James Bryce’s political analysis of the Porfirian regime. In October 1901, Bryce visited Mexico and wrote letters to his family portraying his stay. Afterward, based upon his travel account, he spoke about the country in two conferences, one time in Oxford (1902) and another in Aberdeen (1903). Later on, he wrote about Mexico in his book South America: Observations and Impressions (1912), which was the result of his travels through Latin America in 1901 and 1910. We shall explore Bryce’s position toward the Porfirian regime, from disinterest in Porfirio Díaz’s despotism and the political elite in 1901 to admiration of its achievement of peace and progress in 1911 once the Mexican Revolution had commenced.

Carte blanche to Travel Narrative

The “spatial turn” in the humanities has pointed out how space is produced and how it is affected by power relations, while critical geography has identified the impact of these relations on cartographic representation of space. The presence of maps in travel narratives thus carries certain ideologies and influences the narratives. In Un livre blanc: récit avec cartes [ A Blank Book: Narrative with Maps ] (2007), contemporary French author Philippe Vasset attempts to describe the fifty blank spaces that he has noticed on the topographic map of Paris and its suburbs and visited over a one-year period. This article analyzes the major impact of maps on this narrative and the representation of space that it creates. Despite a direct experience of these “blank spaces”, the narrator is affected by a “cartographic performativity” that prompts him to treat space as a map, and he aims to write as a disembodied cartographer.