En el artículo, se investiga la presencia de la lengua polaca en los textos de escritores y escritoras judíos/as latinoamericanos/as. Se interpreta, desde esta perspectiva, el cuento largo Oh gueto ...mi amor del guatemalteco Eduardo Halfon y las siguientes novelas: Poste restante de la chilena Cynthia Rimsky, Las cartas que no llegaron del uruguayo Mauricio Rosencof y Lengua vespertina de la argentina Perla Sneh. Los textos analizados relatan el viaje del narrador o la narradora a Polonia –es decir, a la tierra de origen de sus antepasados– durante el cual se ensayan diferentes maneras de establecer la comunicación con los nativos, cuya lengua se desconoce. De este modo, el polaco connota “lo incomprensible”, sirviendo también como metáfora de la incomprensibilidad de las atrocidades históricas. La mayoría de las veces los narradores y las narradoras acuden a la ayuda de un o una intérprete que filtra la información recibida y actúa de mediador entre ambas culturas, como ocurre también en el paradigmático documental Shoah de Claude Lanzmann. La presencia del polaco en los textos latinoamericanos escritos en castellano abarca desde los casos de una manifestación meramente residual (en forma de palabras sueltas o nombres propios) hasta una reflexión compleja sobre la posible inclusión del polaco como lengua de la escritura y su papel en la recuperación de la identidad e historia individuales. En el análisis, se toma también en cuenta la carga afectiva del polaco que resulta un idioma cuya neutralidad y objetividad –al menos en los testimonios sobre el Holocausto– se cuestiona.
In 1869, the year the Suez Canal was completed, visits to Egypt and, therefore voyages to the Orient were increased. Crowned royals such as Prince and Princess of Wales, French Empress, Prince of ...Prussia, Austrian Emperor, Prince and Princess of Holland, and Duke of Aosta went on these voyages, which included cities like Alexandria, Cairo, Istanbul, and Athens. What makes these crowned royal's travels to the Orient in 1869 distinguishing and worth investigating is the presence of women. Examining on the Istanbul part of the voyages, this research accepts women as historical actors. It aims to interpret European women's gaze on both Ottoman Istanbul and their 'other', local Muslim women, through their time-space experiences. This paper focuses on travel narratives produced by the women in the suite of British and French crowned royals in the 1869 travels to decipher women's real time-space experiences. Levant Herald (LH), a local newspaper published daily in Istanbul, was also examined to grasp locals' perspectives simultaneously. While emphasizing the unmet expectations of both counterparts' (guest/local), this paper discovers diversifying positionalities of women towards their other and reveals their heterogeneous gaze. Although women's gaze -and thus narratives- contain many orientalist codifications, their gender privileged time-space experiences challenge and disrupt some of the stereotypes and prejudices prevalent in the male-dominated literature of the period.
This study is based on a sub-corpus extracted from the French Corpus Lessico dei Beni Culturali (University of Florence), which contains travel writings of French-speaking authors ranging from the ...16th to the 21th century, with Florence, the cradle of the Rinascimento, as a backdrop. We first analyze the various names that contribute to the discursive construction of this “mecca for tourists” (topographical names, chrononyms, titles of works). Secondly, we focus our attention on the stereotypical representations based on the value of “beauty” attributed to Florentine art works and monuments. Finally, we attempt to identify the discursive modalities that have the function of “desacralizing” these works, a desacralization that is strikingly expressed in the “Stendhal syndrome”, an emotional disorder with oxymoronic discursive characteristics (ethos and pathos)
In Orientalism (1979), one of his most prominent works, Edward Said lays out a critique of the West’s framing and perceptions of the East. It reveals how Eastern communities and individuals are being ...imagined and reconstructed by the authoritative gaze and ideals of Western imperialism. Said explains how Western writings represent the East as an inferior, the Other which, justifies the European Western power over the East. The depiction of the harem as exotic oriental women is a long-familiar trope found in various Orientalist writings. The paper examines the representations of Oriental women in Frederick Millingen’s Wild Life Among the Koords (1870). The theoretical framework draws on the formulation of the travel writer’s representation of Oriental women in the context of Orientalist discourse and feminist criticism. It explores how the Orientalist constitutes himself and his subjectivity through the agency of desire and supremacy. This paper argues that this is not a question of the other, but rather a question of the Western subject’s views to present his visions of himself within foreign landscapes. Moreover, the detailed description of Oriental women and the depiction of Oriental culture establish modes of reorientation where women are discriminated against and sexualized.
The present article seeks to analyze the representation of Yemeni culture in early 20th century British travel writings. It questions the British travel writings as merely stereotypical texts or ...regard them as vital historical documents. This article also tries to locate different themes that have been deploying by British writers in the respective period. The chosen works are by Harold Ingrams (1937) and Freya Stark (1948), which have shown different features about the relationship between Yemeni culture and the British attitude. I used the postcolonial theory and Orientalism as approaches to analyze the works under examination. In the analysis, I argued that a writer’s choice for language and content entails a lot of differences, which reflects the location of Yemeni culture in the eyes of the Western encounters, particularly British travelers’ accounts. Finally, I revealed how two writers have portrayed Yemeni culture, its land, people, and presented diverse images of Yemen to emphasize my assumption that British travel writings on Yemen are both diverse and complex in their representation.
This study examines the meaning of the imaginative geography created by contact with communist countries and the prospects for a post-Cold War world. It analyzes newspaper articles, TV documentaries, ...and the written travelogue about Richard E. Kim’s (Korean name Kim Ŭn’guk 金恩國) travels to China and the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. During this time, neither China nor the Soviet Union had established diplomatic ties with South Korea, and they were not regions in which Koreans could travel freely. As such, the Korean public’s perception of communist countries was somewhat limited. However, as a U.S. citizen, Kim could travel to these countries, and his travels subsequently received significant attention from the South Korean public. Kim gave accounts of his travels in newspapers and books and on TV, but the interpretations of these trips differed according to the medium. Newspapers and documentaries represented the communist countries and the lives of ethnic Koreans according to Cold War Orientalism and emphasized nationalist identity, while Kim’s travelogue departed from both Cold War Orientalism and nationalist identity. Kim’s approach emphasized differences that could not be unified and presented a desirable subjectivity for the upcoming post-Cold War era. In sum, while the documentaries highlighted nationalism, Kim’s travel writing suggested a cosmopolitan subjectivity, two perspectives that differed radically in their prospects for the future.
This article examines diverse travel narratives about steamship voyages to Asia in the first two decades after the opening of the Suez Canal, with special focus on journeys through the Suez Canal, ...Red Sea, and Indian Ocean. Sources include Polish, Serbian and Russian authors: Julian Fałat, Vlado Ivelić, Lucjan Jurkiewicz, Milan Jovanović, Vsevolod Krestovskiy, Karol Lanckoroński, Bronisław Piłsudski, Paweł Sapieha, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Ivan Yuvachev, Hugo Zapałowicz, and Ivan Zarubin. Given this variety of sources, consisting of 12 accounts in 3 languages, written by different types of travellers with dissimilar social backgrounds, it is possible to demonstrate a variety of phenomena that may be associated with steamship voyages. The two main issues examined here are: 1) the coexistence of multiple mobilities in the era of steam power, 2) different experiences of time while voyaging.
This paper examines the representation of India in the works of Latin American women writers in the 20th Century. With the advent of Modernism in Latin America in the late 19th Century as a ...turn-of-the-century movement, Latin American intellectuals started engaging with India such as Rubén Darío in Azul (1888). However, it was Gabriela Mistral, a Nobel laureate from Chile, who although never travelled to India, may be considered the first Latin American woman writer who engaged with India through the appreciation of Tagore in her literary repertoire. Furthermore, in the 20th Century Cecília Meireles, one of the most famous Modernist poets from Brazil visited India in 1953 upon being invited by Jawaharlal Nehru. She noted in her diary that as paradoxical as it sounds, it is much easier to understand India if one knows Brazil. She drew similarities between the fundamental issues of the two countries then. She wrote the anthology Poemas Escritos Na Índia (1961). Another important performance artist is Josefina Báez who would combine yoga and her lived experience in the three spaces of New York, La Romana in the Dominican Republic and India to produce zany dance dramas like Dominicanish (2001). She uses the classical dance form of Kuchipudi originating in the south of India to restructure her Dominican cultural identity in New York. Another contemporary Mexican writer, Margo Glantz, wrote her work Coronada de Moscas (2012), which is a travelogue based on her three sojourns in India accompanied with photographs by Alina López Cámara. The paper analyses the works by the above-mentioned Latin American intellectuals vis-à-vis representation of India in them and focuses on what it is to travel to India and write on it for Latin American women in the 20th Century. This has been done using the theoretical perspective of bell hooks (Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, 1984) and Mary Louise Pratt (Imperial Eyes, 1992).
In late 1741 Benigna von Zinzendorf, a fifteen-year-old woman, arrived in North America from Europe, right around the period in which the Moravian community in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was organized. ...Scholarship on the founding years of the Moravian Church in North America has been largely based upon the communal Bethlehem Diary, and narrated through the writings of Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, Benigna's father, August Gottlieb Spangenberg, and other patriarchal figures. Archivists recognize the importance of increasing access to handwritten archival materials and manuscript collections, especially those that give historical agency to underrepresented groups in archives. In an effort to diversify the body of accessible source materials from this era, transcribed and translated here are four reports that Benigna wrote and addressed from North America, 1741–42, to Moravian women in Europe.
Nikos Kazantzakis is one of the most famous Greek authors of the 20th century known primarily for his novels. A significant part of Nikos Kazantzakis’s work is his travel writings. Whereas the novels ...of Kazantzakis are recognized as canonical Greek literature, it is difficult to pinpoint his travelogues, or Ταξιδεύοντας (Traveling) due to the ambiguity of their critical reception: assessments range from neutral or mildly negative to enthusiastic. Both critical and enthusiastic assessments usually lack in-depth analysis of poetic, thematic, compositional, and stylistic features of the Traveling cycle. This essay is an attempt at a more cogent and motivated assessment of Kazantzakis’s cycle of travel notes and his role in the development of this genre. In contrast to the general view in Greek criticism, I argue that the genre of travelogue had developed for an extended period before Traveling was published and that Kazantzakis’s predecessors and contemporaries had contributed to its development. Among them is Kazantzakis’s contemporary Kostas Ouranis whose work has aspects and features to be found in the later work of Kazantzakis as the comparative analysis of the travel notes by both authors demonstrates.
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