Travel Worlds: Journeys in Contemporary Cultural Politics - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1856495620 ISBN 13: 9781856495622

Publisher: Zed Books Ltd, 1999

Synopsis

African-American musicians head East for Kung-Fu kicks while paedophiles go for cheap sex pilgrimage; Western bible-bashers adopt missionary positions in India while heroic Saint George signs on as an Arab soldier in Britain; the scars of Partition mock the protocols of transit, while nomadic insurgents resist the Bangladeshi nation state with lyrical persuasion; Kula Shaker and Madonna trinketize the ‘Orient’ while dead tourists exchange values with travelling ‘terrorists’; British Mirpuris and Black women travel back to the ‘Old Country’ and beyond in ways that are not quite as they seem; and ethnographers collide with tourists in the carousel of Goa’s resorts. Including poetry and fiction alongside academic essays, this book refuses simplistic dichotomies of north/south and east/west and confronts head on existing conventions of writing about travel in post-colonial, literary and cultural studies. In so doing, it sheds new light on: * the shortcomings of border theories and nation-state parameters * the politics of diasporic and transnational travels * the relations between tourism and terrorism * the limitations of ‘alternative’ tourism TRAVEL WORLDS plots the politics of diverse journeys; it is ‘something of a travel guide, something of a hold-all backpack, and something of another compass’.

About this title

About the Author

Raminder Kaur has recently finished her PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and is Artistic Director and chief script writer of Chandica Arts.

John Hutnyk is currently European Research Fellow in Social Sciences at the University of Heidelberg.

Edition details

• Publisher: Zed Books Ltd
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1856495620
• ISBN 13: 9781856495622
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192
• Editor: Kaur Raminder, Hutnyk John