Contemporary Travel Writing of Latin America

拉丁美洲当代旅行写作

• 批准号: AH/G004528/1
• 负责人: Claire Lindsay
• 金额: $ 2.74万
• 依托单位: University College London
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2009
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2009 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FG004528%2F1
• 关键词: Contemporary; Travel; Writing; Latin; America

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.

我的研究项目将探讨来自拉丁美洲的当代旅行者如何书写他们在家乡和家乡的旅程。它将调查 20 世纪末，在一个普遍流离失所的时期，该地区各地的旅行文本采用了哪些类型的叙事形式和旅行体验。在过去的十五年里，学者和普通读者对旅行写作产生了前所未有的兴趣。结果，包括人类学、历史学、文学和文化研究在内的许多不同学科对旅行叙事的形式、功能和历史进行了彻底的重新评估。这种包含民族志、历史和文学话语的混合体裁曾一度被诟病为反动派或仅仅因其纪实品质而受到赞誉，但现在开始逐渐暴露出来。欧洲的前殖民地一直并将继续吸引大量以英语为母语的旅行者，迄今为止，该领域的大部分现有学术成果都与他们的工作有关。事实上，历史上有关拉丁美洲的旅行写作，从埃尔南·科尔特斯到布鲁斯·查特文，主要是由外国旅行者（通常是欧洲旅行者）撰写的，特别是在殖民时期和独立后时代，它经常以异国主义和/或帝国主义的术语来描述这片大陆。我的研究项目对该地区的流派采取了新的方法。继过去二十年拉丁美洲出现了一批引人入胜的作品之后，本书探讨了地区旅行作家如何利用这种丰富但不稳定的形式来反驳甚至证实外国前辈所创造的神话。我将借鉴人类学、文学研究、社会学和大陆哲学的思想，探讨拉丁美洲当代旅行写作的复杂性，通过一系列关于拉丁美洲四个关键“旅行地点”的案例研究来阐明我的论点：巴塔哥尼亚、安第斯山脉、墨西哥和美墨边境。我的研究将说明这些当代旅行作家的作品不仅涉及“回写”中心：从根本上来说，它还证明了旅行本身观念的改变。与那些历史悠久的征服、扩张或休闲旅行不同，拉丁美洲的国内旅行遵循多种过境模式，包括经济移民、政治流放，以及关于该大陆旅行“本体论”的哲学思辨。因此，拉丁美洲的旅行写作挑战了正统的西方流动范式，并提出了当今全球迫切关注的有关流离失所、移民和身份的重要问题。