VOYAGES
An International, Multidisciplinary Postgraduate Conference
School of Modern Languages, University of Liverpool
27-28 June 2002
CALL FOR PAPERS
The recent return to considerations of the theories and practices of travel has had a major impact on a range of disciplines, including cultural studies, literary studies, ethnology, geography, women's studies, and postcolonial studies. All of these concern, to a lesser or greater extent, those engaged in research on French and Francophone cultures, and the conference will provide an opportunity to explore the relationship of these ongoing debates to French-speaking regions, countries, societies and communities. As a port and maritime centre whose role in the emergence of Atlantic cultures is receiving increasing attention, Liverpool seems to be a particularly appropriate venue to host such an event. In addition, the School of Modern Languages at the University of Liverpool is currently host to a major AHRB-funded project devoted to 'New Approaches to Twentieth-Century Travel Literature in French'.
The return to travel is not only part of a series of associated returns, to the body, to experience, to the self, to the récit, but is also often privileged as the matrix in which these other 'returns' intersect and interact. Yet the phrase 'return to travel', a phrase itself reliant on the figures of journeying, ignores the fact that travel has never really gone away, and has indeed long existed as a generalized mode of intellectual production, identity formation and cultural interrelationship. Edward Said has accordingly privileged the notion in his idea of 'traveling theory', an understanding of theory that depends on constant displacement, uprooting and re-rooting. James Clifford has expanded the idea, into that of 'traveling cultures', in order to undermine any essentialist, static view of cultural rootedness and to underline the importance of dynamic 'routes' for the formation of individual and cultural identity.
It is on these ideas of voyages and routes, understood in their most general applications, that the conference will focus, inviting papers from any postgraduate researcher whose work explores the historical, literary or theoretical aspects of travel as these manifest themselves in any Francophone cultures. Recognizing the complex implications of the travel of language and culture, the epithet 'Francophone' is understood in its most inclusive senses, embracing any culture inside or outside Europe in which French is one of the accepted means of communication. For to study travel is to acknowledge that any understanding of culture and identity depends on consideration of otherness as much as on that of the self. But at the same time, travel problematizes otherness through the unstable meetings in the contact zones it engenders; it rejects reduction of the other to any simple monolith; it depends constantly on an implicit sense of diversity (whether real or imagined). And it is thanks to travel that the Western self can become other, viewed as exotic by the potentially disruptive yet often ignored gaze of the travellee or challenged, at home, when others begin to journey from elsewhere.
Papers are invited from postgraduate researchers whose work explores any aspect of travel in the French-speaking world. Although it is anticipated that the conference will focus on the modern period (and in particular on post-Revolutionary material), papers concerned with earlier periods are welcome, as are proposals that offer a comparative approach to French-speaking and other cultures.
Although this list is by no means exhaustive, papers might address the following areas:
travel and the construction of space;
generic aspects of travel writing;
means of transport and the representation of space;
colonial and postcolonial journeys;
travel and tourism;
critical theory and the figures of travel;
travel and translation;
travel and gender;
immobility and armchair travel;
cartography;
travel literature and 'travel stories';
domestic journeys;
travel and exile;
travel and photography;
space and time travel;
the end(s) of travel.
Proposals of about 300 words (in English or French, by 5 April, please), expressions of interest and other questions should be sent to:
Feroza Basu (feroza@liverpool.ac.uk) or Siobhán Shilton (siobhanshilton@hotmail.com):
Department of French
School of Modern Languages
University of Liverpool
Liverpool
L69 7ZR
Fax: 0151 794 2357