Introduction

The propensity to travel and mobility has always been integral to our lives. Contemporary processes of globalization have revealed the extent to which not only people but also di erent cultural texts, projects, and ideas travel from one location to another, often transforming themselves in the process and resulting in new identities and narratives. In Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996), sociologist Arjun Appadurai, for instance, has described that process by pointing to the formation of various new landscapes, or “imagined worlds”: his “mediascapes” and “ethnoscapes” are examples of the cross-border fl ows of people, media images, and ideologies peculiar to today’s globalized world where borders are porous and national cultures no longer intact and protected (if they ever were) but always allow for the export and import of new ideas and people, often leading to the emergence of new identities and local adaptations of the global. Such encounters with and images of alterity, as experienced by fi ctional and non-fi ctional travelers, are in the focus of the chapters in this volume. By mapping out diverse narratives of travel in various geographical, cultural, and historical locations from the nineteenth to the twentyfi rst century, they seek to revise simplifi ed understandings that juxtapose home with foreign, local with global, national with transnational, as well as self with Other, with the aim of locating emerging confi gurations of identity in the frameworks of transnationalism and transculturation. In these processes conventional hegemonies and polarizations are revealed to be insu cient to explain cultural transformations generated by global mobilities. By their occasionally unorthodox application of these concepts, the chapters expand as well as reframe the “geohistorical rootedness of narratives” (Friedman 4). As anthropologist James Cli ord puts it: “Travels and contacts are crucial sites for an unfi nished modernity” (2).