ABSTRACT
I have for a number of years been reading the work of twentieth-century artists and intellectuals that I regard as political tourists, that is, those whose travel is motivated by a desire to participate in or manifest solidarity with a political struggle ostensibly not their own. In researching these writers, I have spent a good deal of time in archives, looking at travel diaries, at photographs, at scrapbooks-looking, in short, at the souvenirs of political tourism, mementos of a politically engaged life. I have begun to think about the archival value of this material that for me manifests the processes of identification and the political affect that characterize the work of those who travel in order to change both the world and themselves. The texts that political tourists produce, as well as the other documents they keep, are testimony to an archival practice at the heart of political tourism, and it is that archival practice that I aim to focus on here. I am, of course, aware that the documents that end up in actually existing archives are not entirely up to the political tourists in question: the documents are subject to another set of archival practices, namely those of literary executors and institutional archivists, and the documents are also subject to the untimely deaths of their owners, to the depredations of war or other destructive forces, or the decisions of loved ones to keep and even to publish what was meant to be burned, or to burn what might have been kept. According to Derrida, “the archive, if this word or this figure can be stabilized so as to take on a signification, will never be either memory or anamnesis as spontaneous, alive and internal experience”.1 I am, however, not reading the materials in a given archive as constituting an organic unity or, for that matter, as presenting incontrovertible evidence about events in the world. Instead, I am interested in discerning, from both published texts and other documents that the political tourists collected, the discursive practice that marks what the travellers elected to document.
