Voyage Out ISTW 2004 CFP

Tilar Mazzeo / ISTW 2004
Department of English
University of Wisconsin Oshkosh
800 Algoma Boulevard
Oshkosh, WI 54901 USA

Proposals for panels and 20-minute papers are sought from scholars working in all areas of travel writing, including literary studies, history, sociology, anthropology, indigenous studies, political science, American studies, environmental studies, and media studies. ISTW is an interdisciplinary group whose members examine all aspects of traveling, tourism, and the journey. Papers are sought on topics addressing the literature, practices, and artifacts of travel, exploration, discovery, and adventure from the ancient period to the present, as well as written and visual travel documents such as guidebooks, postcards, and photographs.

Please forward 300 word abstracts, including title, professional affiliation, addresses (especially e-mail), phone number, and AV requirements, by June 15, 2004. Electronic submissions are highly encouraged. Notification of acceptance of your paper will be sent no later than August 1, 2004. Papers should be delivered in English. Overhead projectors will be supplied by the conference; there is a substantial charge to individual participants requesting slide projectors, VCR / monitor, and computer display packages.

In addition, a selection of refereed papers from the conference is sought for publication. Scholars interested in being considered for this volume should supply two hard copies of their submission and an electronic copy on a 3.5" floppy disk in MS Word. Manuscripts should be handed in at the registration desk upon arrival. Please follow current MLA format, not exceeding twenty double spaced pages.

Papers addressing the vexed relations between travel and altruism. We hope to complicate dominant scholarly narratives about the complicity of Western travellers in colonialism and oppression by recovering and examining critically various discourses of altruism in travel books, such as those by missionaries, diplomats, Peace Corps volunteers. Inquiries and proposals welcome.

Travel and Fetish: An Exploration into the Relationships between Travel, Travel Writings, and Fetishisms. Deadline for submission of abstracts to this panel extended to July 15, 2004.

This panel shall be a forum to explore various concepts and forms of fetish and fetishism in relation to travel and travel writings. According to William Pietz, fetishism is the result of a “crosscultural effect” “formed by the encounter of radically heterogenous social systems” and “emerged out of this particular historical situation” (Pietz 1985: 7, 10/11). Travel and encounters in the “contact zone” (Pratt) are therefore fundamental for the emergence of fetishism and the circulation of objects of fetish. The term fetish or pidgin “fetisso” was brought from West Africa to Europe by Portuguese traders, mariners, and missionaries in the seventeenth century. Since then the term has undergone many mutations and transformations in meaning, from that of an object of religion (Compte) to an object to capitalist adoration (Marx) or sexual aberration (Freud). What they all have in common is that a special intense relationship exists between the subject and a specific object . Patricia Spyer reads “fetish” as a hybrid concept, which is “[N]neither here nor there, past or future, fully absent or unambiguously present …” (1998:1). Fetishism thus contains a dialectic of creating borders and unsettling them at the same time. With tourism new fetishes emerged, which can be explained both from a Marxist and psychoanalytical perspective, such as souvenirs and sex tourism. In this panel we would like to explore fetishism as an important phenomenon of travel, which has so far not received enough attention. We would like to investigate the relationships of power, the motivations, and the effects as well as the limits of fetishes and fetishism, and therefore

invite papers that explore in multiple ways the connections between travel and fetish from different disciplines:

Possible topics may include but are not limited to:

-         Collecting (souvenirs) as fetish

-         Fetishism represented in travel writings

-         Fetish as a hybrid concept

-         Pilgrimages and fetishism

-         The conception and demise of fetish power in the history of travel

-         Fetishism and tourism

-         The role of fetish in processes of Othering and relations to the O/other

-         Travel, fetish, and the nation

-         Fetish as a “space of cultural revolution” (Pietz 1985: 11)

The papers should be prepared for a1 5-20 minute presentation. Please present rather than read.

Please send 1-2 page abstracts as attachments to:

Ulrike Brisson

Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures

The University of Massachusetts Amherst

ubrisson@german.umass.edu

Call for papers for a proposed panel on Bayard Taylor

"The coexistence of a traveled brain and an untravelled heart, is what few people can understand." Bayard Taylor, 1859.

By sheer volume of production and his notoriety among his contemporaries, Bayard Taylor was one of the most celebrated literary figures of the mid-nineteenth century. He was a literary prodigy, expending his energies in seventeen volumes of occasional and narrative verse, four novels, eight critical works and translations of German classics, nineteen

travel narratives, innumerable magazine essays, short stories, and reviews, and thousands upon thousands of letters to friends, admirers, hostile reviewers, chance acquaintances, and intimate male companions--this last not being much discussed till years after his death. His extraordinary success on the public lecture circuit made him one of the best-known men of his day, and when combined with the financial success of most of his printed works, his eminence as an American man of letters was impossible to deny. His diplomatic career enhanced his reputation and influence as an interlocutor of foreign places and peoples to an American audience and included service as a writer for the Perry

Expedition to Japan, as a charge d'affaires to Russia during the Civil War, and ambassador to Germany in 1878.

Topics to be considered include but are not limited to:

* Taylor's representations of Islam and Islamic countries;

* Travel motifs and the influence of travel in Taylor's poetry and novels;

* the construction of race in Taylor's travel works;

* Taylor as exemplar or outlier in geneaologies of U.S. Imperialism;

* Visual representations of Taylor in foreign dress;

* Taylor in the company of other 19th c. American travelers;

* Egalitarian travel and the democratization of culture in the Jacksonian era.

Please forward 300 word abstracts, including title, professional affiliation, addresses (especially e-mail), phone number, by June 1, 2004. Electronic submissions are encouraged.

Submissions to:

Liam Corley
University of California, Riverside

3363 Utah Street

Riverside, CA 92507

CorleyL@citrus.ucr.edu

Travel Writing from the War Zone

This special panel will highlight the particular ways the travel text is shaped by war zone contexts. Travel Writing

from any geographical place and contact zone complicates notions of here and there, home and away from home, self

and Other, time and timelessness. How are these notions reshaped in the crisis of wartime? Papers on autobiographical and epistolary writings from the war zone are of special interest, though papers on war zone writings of all genres will be considered.

Please send abstracts to:

Margaret McColley: mem4r@virginia.edu

Department of French

302 Cabell Hall. P.O.Box 4470

Charlottesville, VA.22904-4470

http://www.people.virginia.edu/~mem4r/

October 21-24, 2004 . Hyatt Regency . Milwaukee, Wisconsin