Women's travel narratives

Through the British Looking Glass: Constructing the "Other" in the Nineteenth Century

by Cherish Asha Bolton

This paper examines the uses of British travel narratives from 1800-1840 as sources of information for the British... more This paper examines the uses of British travel narratives from 1800-1840 as sources of information for the British public.  The questions addressed are whether travel accounts contain different language and information when describing India or Argentina; if so, what are the social, economic, and cultural reasons for the disparate accounts; and, finally, how do the differences in rhetoric describe the British empire.  Travel narratives specifically provided valuable information to their audience:  they described strange indigenous people and sweeping landscapes, illustrated exotic art and architecture, and introduced new markets and investment opportunities.  They made people feel as though they were part of the expansion and administration of empire without leaving the British archipelago.  However, travel narratives did more than fill the imaginations of their readers; they also helped to shape the motivations and ideologies of empire.  As its power expanded and its conquests multiplied in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, British rule took on dramatically different characteristics in its varied territories, exhibiting the qualities of both formal and informal empire.  The duality of imperialism can be clearly identified in Britain's relations in India and Argentina:  in the former, Britain exerted commercial and administrative power, and in the latter, it introduced new markets through a form of trade monopoly.  Travelers to Argentina or India in the early nineteenth century wrote disparate accounts:  those on Argentina tended to focus more on commerce, whereas those on India tended to highlight culture.  This paper considers the characteristics of British hegemony in the two locations and explores how the differences affected the prose of travel writers.  It argues that travel writing was not monolithic:  writers were engaged in adapting the discourse on empire according to geography, commerce, and culture.  However, this examination of popular British travelogues shows that despite the subject or region under the purview of the authors, the underlying themes were the same.  Indeed, whether or not it was the authors' intention, their experiences propagated the idea of empire.  Moreover, the narratives show that the discourse of empire was malleable and conformed to local geography, politics, commerce, and culture. 

MY DEPENDENCY AND OTHER SELVES

by Linda Lund Pedersen

Traversing Hegemony: Gender, Body and Identity in the Narratives of Israeli Female Israeli Backpackers

by Chaim Noy

Special Issue titled Female Travelers II. Tourism Review International, 12(2): 93-114. (2008).

Extraterritorialidad y Transculturación Recuerdos de viaje de Eduardo Mansilla (1882)

by JP Spicer-Escalante

Reprint:

http://webserver.rcp.net.pe/cemhal/Viajeras%20entre%20dos%20mundos.pdf

Book chapter. First published in Viajeras entre dos mundos. Ed. & Comp. Sara Beatriz Guardia, Lima: CEMHAL, 2011. 359-372.

Hearing the Call Along the Nile: an early draft of travel notes from Egypt journeying in the SS Karim

by V.K. McCarty

Incidents of Travel

by Ju Hui Judy Han

Han, J. 1998. Incidents of Travel. In Q&A: Queer in Asian America, ed. David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom, 398 – 404. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Discovering the Political Traveler in Wollstonecraft's Letters (1796) and Holcroft's Travels (1804)

by Miriam Wallace

Journeys, 12.1 (Summer 2011): 1–21.
Full text online for free

Best known as political radicals and novelists, Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Holcroft each wrote a travel narrative:... more Best known as political radicals and novelists, Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Holcroft each wrote a travel narrative: Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark ([1796] 1987) and Travels from Hamburg through Westphalia, Holland and the Netherlands to Paris (1804), respectively. Despite their specific differences, both Wollstonecraft and Holcroft reconfigure travel as a politically inflected act of cultural encounter, resisting both the Grand Tour tradition of elite education and Romantic travel as an asocial and personal experience of the sublime. Although Wollstonecraft’s account has been examined as a kind of feminine sublime or roman à clef, her political project has frequently been elided, seen as separate from the personal affect of her account. Holcroft’s narrative is simply neglected. Reading these two travel accounts as products of late eighteenth- century British radical reform and developing Romantic sensibility enhances our understanding of eighteenth-century travel narrative and British Romanticism itself.
Keywords: Grand Tour, Holcroft, Jacobin, political travel, Romanticism, Scandinavia, situated knowledge, Wollstonecraft

Ethnography destination

by Stotropama Mukherjee

Ethnography destination
Khecheopalri Lake was my main destination for the Ethnography project. Located at 27° 22′ 24″ N, 88° 12′ 30″ E, Khecheopalri Lake is located near Khecheopalri village, 147 kilometres (91 mi) west of Gangtok and 34 kilometres (21 mi) to the northwest of Pelling town in the West Sikkim district of the North-eastern Indian state of Sikkim.

Reasons for selecting this particular location:

 Khecheopalri Lake is a sacred Lake for both Buddhists and Hindus.

 Rich in multi-ethnic culture.

 A modern day hub for international tourists.

 An auspicious destination.

 Myths and legends aging thousands of years.

 Drastic progress of land development to satisfy foreign and national tourists

 Influence of foreign culture on these parts of the country. 

But this is only of the many stories that go around about the Khecheopalri Lake. The significance of the Khecheopalri... more But this is only of the many stories that go around about the Khecheopalri Lake. The significance of the Khecheopalri Lake lies in the fact that it is worshiped by the Buddhists as well as the Hindus.The serene waters of this Lake appears to comprise a celestial charisma. According to the legend, birds remove any leaves that fall onto the lake's surface and hence the lake remains clean. A local named Ugyen, considered a village elder has another story to tell-there were two sister lakes in the northwestern part of the Himalayas. The elder lake is still there but the younger lake, which is called Labding Pokhari, moved to the western part of Sikkim to a place called Yuksam. The people in Yuksam (the ³rst capital of Sikkim) did not respect Labding Pokhari and deposited waste into her waters. The goddess got dismayed and μew the lake ³rst to a place called Chhojo. It could not fit into the area so the goddess then shifted the lake to Khecheopalri. Apart from the marshy land with terrestrial vegetation, the dead Chhojo Lake, located at the bottom of the hill, has no open water surface.

Social Worker Interventions in Situations of Domestic Violence: What We Can Learn from Survivors' Personal Narratives?

by June Keeling

Social workers are an integral provider in the statutory support offered to women experiencing domestic violence. This... more Social workers are an integral provider in the statutory support offered to women experiencing domestic violence. This paper uses information obtained from women's personal narratives to examine this social worker–client relationship in situations of domestic violence. Embracing a feminist standpoint epistemology and focusing on the women's experiences, it is evident that many of the women expressed dissatisfaction with the way they were treated by social workers. Threats to remove the children from the home and victim blaming were among the tactics described. The parallel between such reported forms of coercion employed by social workers and those used by the abuser are striking. The findings suggest a lack of a favourable climate to ensure the safety of the woman and her family through the provision of family-centred care and a need to build more effective and supportive relationships with women experiencing domestic violence. Implications for social work practice are also discussed.

WOMEN ON THE ROAD: LEAVE YOUR BAGGAGE BEHIND

by Maria Bajner

Voyage au pays des mystiques : une aristocrate russe dans les cours allemandes de la Restauration

by Stella Ghervas

published in "Voyager en Europe de Humboldt à Stendhal (1790-1840)", Nicolas Bourguinat & Sylvain Venayre (eds), Paris, Nouveau Monde éditions, 2007.