Travellers

In a globalized world, long-standing hierarchies of travellers and betravelled have fallen into disarray. While certainly not everyone can travel anywhere (particularly in the era of the Corona pandemic that may still be with us for some time), well-established geographical imaginations of “the North” or “the West” travelling in “the South” or “the East” are rapidly losing plausibility as global mobility is rapidly increasing across a wide array of travellers and destinations.

This seminar will take a sustained look at theories of global mobility and travel as well as recent debates on ‘decentring’ the field of travel literature, but it will also move beyond the generic borders of ‘travel writing’ to explore new and unexpected figurations of travellers in contemporary anglophone fiction.