ABSTRACT

Most of us, at various moments in our lives, either adopt a `tourist' identity of are framed within another's tourist experience. Travellers' Tales investigates the future for travelling in a world whose boundaries are shifting and dissolving. The contributors bring together popular and critical discourses of travel to explore questions of identity and politics; history and narration; collecting and representing other cultures. Travellers' tales oscillate between the thrill of novel experiences and unexpected pleasures, and the alienation and loneliness of exile in a strange land. The contributions review recent work on the discourses of tourism, travel and cultural politics; the effects of global interactions and local resistances, and the ways in which records, memorials and signs have all been used to describe the experience of encountering the `other'.

part |19 pages

Forwards

chapter 1|18 pages

Other than myself/my other self

part |62 pages

Neighbours

chapter 4|27 pages

Territories of desire

reconsiderations of an African childhood

part |39 pages

Home and away

chapter 5|13 pages

Home and identity

chapter 7|16 pages

Refugees and homecomings

Bessie Head and the end of exile

part |69 pages

Crossroads

part |46 pages

Take the high road

chapter 14|9 pages

Travel for men

from Claude Lévi-Strauss to the Sailor Hans

chapter 15|18 pages

Why travel?

Tropics, en-tropics and apotropaics

part |6 pages

Backwords

chapter 16|5 pages

Leaky habitats and broken grammar