Women and Wanderer: Postcolonial (Re)interpretations of Travel and Travel Writing

妇女与流浪者：旅行和旅行写作的后殖民（重新）解释

• 批准号: 2738833
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Leeds
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2022 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2738833
• 关键词: Women; Wanderer; Postcolonial; Re; interpretations

Even though late nineteenth century travel-writing in India is consonant with the desire of "appropriating from European writers the power to represent"1 the history of the nation, Indian women are often thought to lack this autonomous voice. That the aspect of gender has also brought about a generic shift in travel-writing is a gap left unassessed in academia in representations of women mediating their narratorial subjectivities through the extant masculine literary tradition2. From penning an apologia for transgressing on the literary domain to exhaustive accounts of the familial spaces, women perceived and wrote travel very differently from their male contemporaries. Colonial travel-writing from 1870s featured this radical deviance of several "upper-class Indian women utilizing the discourse of travel...according to the needs of their situations"3, thereby often subverting the hegemonic position.Another such momentous shift in Indian travel-writing has transpired post 2010, with the proliferation of Internet travel blogs alongside conventional travelogues. Here too, the accounts are invariably gendered, but the figure of the traveller woman is no longer seen as an aberration, nor are they meant to participate in the transcontinental myth-making projects of a colonized nation. So, in this newfound freedom, their travel-writing is characterized by a renegotiated gender identity. A comparative study of these two periods reveals that in this transition are posited the elusive "racialized gendered selves...at the conjuncture of the transnational and postcolonial"4 . My research will delineate the changing interpretative strategies seen in Indian women's travel-writing from the first time zone (1870 - 1930s) to the second (2010- 2021), and establish in what ways these differences reflect the changing realities of the empire, and its global ramifications on their lives. Even though this is an attempt at a comparison between colonial and postcolonial travelogues within a gendered schema, this is not an exhaustive work. A few representative pieces have been chosen that will help gain an insight into the research questions.Since most colonial travel-writing by women were in Bhasha languages, mostly texts with published English translations have been considered for the study. For the first group, travel narratives of ten women - conventional travelogues or disparate accounts embedded in autobiographies correspondence - will be used as primary texts. For the second, sixteen travelogues will form the corpus alongside travel blogs of content-creators on the Internet. Readings will be supplemented by travellers' interviews to get more of an insight into the industry.

尽管19世纪晚期印度的游记写作符合“从欧洲作家那里获得代表该国历史的力量”的愿望，但印度妇女往往被认为缺乏这种自主的声音。性别方面也带来了旅行写作的总体转变，这是学术界未评估的一个空白，即通过现存的男性文学传统调解女性的叙事主体性。从为自己在文学领域的越界行为道歉，到对家庭空间的详尽描述，女性对旅行的感知和写作都与同时代的男性截然不同。19世纪70年代的殖民旅行写作突出了几个“上层印度妇女利用旅行话语……“根据自己处境的需要”，从而经常颠覆霸权地位。印度旅游写作的另一个重大转变发生在2010年后，随着互联网旅游博客和传统旅游日志的激增。这里的描述也总是带有性别色彩，但旅行者女性的形象不再被视为一种偏差，她们也不打算参与一个殖民国家的横贯大陆的神话创造项目。因此，在这种新获得的自由中，她们的旅行写作以一种重新协商的性别身份为特征。对这两个时期的比较研究表明，在这一转变中，出现了难以捉摸的“种族化的性别自我”……在跨国和后殖民的结合点上。我的研究将描述从第一个时区（1870 - 30年代）到第二个时区（2010- 2021年）印度女性旅行写作中不断变化的解释策略，并确定这些差异以何种方式反映了帝国不断变化的现实，及其对她们生活的全球影响。尽管这是在性别模式下对殖民和后殖民游记进行比较的尝试，但这并不是一个详尽的工作。选择了一些有代表性的作品，这将有助于深入了解研究问题。由于大多数女性的殖民旅行写作都是用巴沙语写的，因此研究中考虑的大多是已出版的英语翻译文本。对于第一组，10位女性的旅行叙述——传统的旅行记录或嵌入在自传通信中的不同叙述——将被用作主要文本。第二，16篇游记将与互联网上的内容创作者的旅游博客一起组成语料库。该报告还将辅以对旅行者的采访，以更深入地了解该行业。