Mobility at Large: Globalization, Textuality and Innovative Travel Writing

Mobility at Large explores a unique trajectory of travel writing. Instead of focussing on best-selling travel texts by Paul Theroux, Bill Bryson, Michael Palin, Alain de Botton and others, this book examines a strand of innovative contemporary travel writing wherein the authors experiment with form, content and the politics of representation. In this, innovative travel texts by a range of writers – from Michael Ondaatje and Caryl Phillips to Daphne Marlatt and Sam Miller – transform the genre by inscribing travel, migration, mobility and displacement within a variety of experimental textual strategies to work through questions of movement and the politics of personal identity in relation to the complex interlocutions of space, place and subjectivity. As a result, Mobility at Large challenges those critics who dismiss the genre as inherently conservative and inextricably bound up in a colonial, Eurocentric tradition. The book also documents a long and rich tradition of travel writing that existed well beyond the influence of Europe.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Introduction: Travel Revisited 1. Travelling with the Ondaatje Bros. 2. Amitav Ghosh and Caryl Phillips: Global Travel, Then and Now 3. Unhomely Travels; or, the Haunts of Daphne Marlatt and W. G. Sebald 4. The World, My City: Home Grounds and Global Cities 5. Travel Histories – From Kuala Lumpur to Istanbul and Beyond Postscript: Still Mobile Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Justin D. Edwards is Research Professor in English at the University of Surrey and the author of Postcolonial Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and Exotic Journeys: Exploring the Erotics of U.S. Travel Literature, 1840-1930 (University of New Hampshire, 2001). Rune Graulund is Lecturer in English at the University of Strathclyde and co-editor (with Justin D. Edwards) of Postcolonial Travel Writing: Critical Explorations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

Review :
Clear, interesting, provocative and well-argued ...I believe this is - surprisingly - the first book-length study of experimental travel writing. It deserves to be considered in the company of the most important critical works on contemporary travel writing. Mobility at Large: Globalization, Textuality, and Innovative Travel Writing, Edwards and Graulund's second collaboration, challenges notions of travel writing as purely Eurocentric. They argue that "the innovative travel text is an extension of the writer" and that "it crosses and recrosses the border between conventional travel writing, auto/biography, fiction and other textual practices in order to question static and holistic conceptions of the writing subject" (6-7). Edwards and Graulund present genre crossing or travel across genre as a tool employed by contemporary writers, but their methodological approach also represents a type of innovation in this field of study; and they situate their work within the body of extant criticism while differentiating their unique approach. As they look at "innovative textual practices" which "circumvent the domains of travel practice by repositioning and destabilizing the traveling, writing subject", Edwards and Graulund consider the relationship of travel writers to globalization (10). At times, this inquiry leads to somewhat problematic findings in the chapters that follow. Chapter 1 explores the "intertextual exchange" in the travel writings of the brothers Christopher and Michael Ondaatje and examines works that are linked thematically (22). Chapter 2 addresses Amitav Ghosh and Caryl Phillips to illustrate how their works present a "challenge to the spatial dimensions of the conventional Eurocentric travel narrative" (49). In chapter 3, the travelogues of Daphne Marlatt and W.G. Sebald are examined for the way they engage "the liminality and in-betweenness of spectral presences" (78). Yet, even as the authors of Mobility at Large praise these writers' innovation, they problematize aspects of their writing, particularly in the cases of Ghosh, Phillips and Marlatt, but less so with the other writers examined. Chapter 4, "My World, My City: Home Grounds and Global Cities", explores the works of Sam Miller, Iain Sinclair and Rachel Lichtenstein, suggesting that "analytic models for understanding travel practice can no longer be grounded in the imperial-colonial paradigm" (123). Edwards and Graulund speak of an "awareness" on the part of the travel writer, but they also note that Miller, among others, still functions within the old paradigm (148). While they examine his innovative writing, they also problematize his "fall[ing] back on conservative form" (151). Ultimately, Edwards and Graulund's efforts to assert the writers' departure "from the Eurocentric travel narrative" may actually function to reinscribe the very thing they seek to upturn (125). Chapter 5 closes the text with a look at a space between Europe and Asia. This most intriguing section of the study explores "texts in which travel and history coincide" and exposes a textual collision of intimacy and distance in the works of Orhan Pamuk and Ziauddin Sardar (167). The authors insist that all the texts examined function "outside the parameters of colonial discourse" (198). While the wide range of travel writing selected for Mobility is a strength that supports this claim, there is also a risk of de-emphasizing the cultural specificity that makes Edwards and Gaulund's new critical approach such an important contribution. This study successfully counters the claim that travel writing is 'doomed to repeat politically problematic images of colonization, racism and exoticism' (p. 198). By the practice of ideological and textual decentring, Edwards and Graulund compellingly argue, innovative travel writing has the potential to expose new forms of Empire that are pervasive in contemporary globalization movements. Concepts of space and place are of course central to an analysis of the topic and references to Baudrillard, de Certeau, Pratt and Auge form part of the theoretical backbone. The object here is to show that, rather than being fixed and stable, such notions, and concomitantly those of self and other, are always in flux. It is precisely this process that is brought to the fore in innovative travel writing when it highlights the constructed nature of space and place as well as their performance in and by the practice of writing and reading. In the space of the text, this is translated for instance by the experimental travel writer's self-reflexive grappling with the ideological connotations underlying the practice of representation of the travelled space and encountered otherness. It is this awareness that leads to the abandonment of the authoritative gaze and the stable identity of the colonial traveller. As the close readings of the chosen texts reveal - and they undoubtedly are the strong point of this excellent study - the textual strategies used by the writers allow them to overcome or circumvent the pitfalls of the genre. Linear structure and teleological narration give way to a poetics of fragmented representation and a hermeneutics of the narrating subject confronting a feeling of displacement in the age of global mobility. On the level of the subject position the latter is illustrated in the multiplication of narrative voices in the texts. On the level of form, fragmentation is reflected by an essentially eclectic structure: the boundaries of the genre are constantly stretched and transgressed when autobiography meets biography, prose meets poetry, social documentary meets (un)official historiography and text meets image. However, for all its well-grounded insights into the production of experimental travel writing, the question of who produces this writing is somewhat elided. Almost all of the writers considered here have a strong link to migration and displacement, either through their family's migrant history (Ondaatje brothers, Ghosh, Philips, Marlatt, Lichtenstein, Sardar) or through international professional experience (Sebald, Pamuk, Miller). Hence the question arises of whether their cultural and linguistic hybridity does not foreground the revision and deconstruction of the large array of tropes of travel writing relating to the subject position (home/out of place, belonging/unbelonging) in the first place. Consequently, one may ask whether a more balanced choice of writers might not have given more strength to Edwards and Graulund's otherwise wholly justified claim. This study successfully counters the claim that travel writing is 'doomed to repeat politically problematic images of colonization, racism and exoticism' (p. 198). By the practice of ideological and textual decentring, Edwards and Graulund compellingly argue, innovative travel writing has the potential to expose new forms of Empire that are pervasive in contemporary globalization movements.