110 – Narratives of Travel and Mobility from 19th and 20th century South Asia
Recent scholarship (Harder; Majchrowicz) has pointed to the explosion of travel writing in vernacular print in colonial India and the importance of new archival methods and practices of reading that might bring lesser-known voices in travel writing to attention. This panel extends these lines of inquiry and invites papers studying travel narratives from late colonial and postcolonial South Asia that move beyond orientalist writing and native responses to focus on the polyphonic nature of this hybrid genre and its articulation of selfhood and identity. We are particularly interested in how South Asian travel writers have tried to reorient the world by writing about regions beyond Western Europe, thus forging alternative global imaginations. How do we understand travel writing as performing an important social role in the contexts of anti-colonial struggles, indenture, global communist networks, pilgrimage, pleasure, pan-Asian and Afro-Asian conferences, exile, conflict, and war? What theories of movement, coercion, time, labour, and leisure emerge from these narratives? Instead of engagements with alterity, might we also consider travel writing as experiments with subjectivity and selfhood? Additionally, how do caste, religion, gender, and sexuality become central to the writers of such narratives even as the narratives offer a site for transcending them in writing? What are the material networks of production, circulation, and consumption that constitute such writing?
We are keenly interested in papers that are attentive to the generic instability and hybridity of travel writing outside the traditional print travelogue in twentieth and twenty first century South Asia in any language.
