Contemporary Travel Writing of Latin America

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My research project will explore how contemporary travellers from Latin America write their journeys at and about home. It will investigate what kinds of narrative forms and experiences of travel are engaged in journey texts from across the region in the late 20th century, during a period of widespread displacement. In the last fifteen years there has been unprecedented interest in travel writing from both scholars and general readers. As a result, there has been a radical reassessment of the form, function and history of the travel narrative in a number of different disciplines including anthropology, history, literary and cultural studies. Once maligned as reactionary or celebrated solely for its documentary qualities, the complexity of this hybrid genre, which encompasses ethnographic, historical and literary discourses, is now beginning to come to light. Europe's former colonies have been and continue to be a magnet for a plethora of Anglophone travellers, with whose work much of the existing scholarship in the field to date has been concerned. Indeed, historically travel writing about Latin America, from Hernán Cortés to Bruce Chatwin, has been written largely by foreign, often European travellers and, in the colonial and post-Independence eras particularly, it frequently depicted the continent in predominantly exoticist and/or imperialist terms. My research project takes a new approach to the genre in this region. Following the emergence in the last two decades of a fascinating body of work from Latin America, it considers how regional travel writers have negotiated this rich, but volatile form in order to counter or even corroborate myths generated by their foreign predecessors. Drawing on ideas from anthropology, literary studies, sociology and continental philosophy, I will explore the complexity of contemporary travel writing from Latin America, illustrating my argument through a series of case studies concerning four key 'sites of travel' there: Patagonia, the Andes, Mexico and the US-Mexico borderlands. My study will illustrate how these contemporary travel writers' work is not only concerned with 'writing back' to the centre: fundamentally, it also attests to changing conceptions of travel itself. In contrast to those time-honoured journeys to the region of conquest, expansion or leisure, domestic journeys in Latin America adhere to a diverse range of models of transit including economic migration, political exile, as well as philosophical speculation regarding the continent's very 'ontology' of travel. As such, travel writing in Latin America challenges orthodox, Western paradigms of mobility and raises important questions about displacement, migration and identity that are of urgent concern across the globe today.