Content: Travel Writing: A mode of constructing knowledge (Issue 56)
Content: Travel Writing: A mode of constructing knowledge (Issue 56)
Posts tagged ‘Travel Writing’
Oct 23
Guest-Editorial – Travel Writing: A mode of constructing knowledge
By Raeesa Usmani
While encountering a variety of foreign customs and traditions, travel makes one aware of different culture, history, religion, belief, tradition, and lifestyle of the residents living at distant places. One might end up exploring, in the process, more about one’s own self, culture, society, which might lead one to appreciating one’s own culture and customs.
Decoding ‘progression’ through ‘intimacy’ as the anchoring aesthetics in Saikat Majumdar’s The Scent of God
By Sudeep Ghosh
In The Scent of God, intimacy is a mediator between experience and knowledge, knowledge and culture, sensory perception and spiritual redemption, truth and falsehood.
Montagu’s ‘The Turkish Embassy Letters’: The Questions of Perception and Representation in Travel Narratives
By Susmita Roy
In her letters, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu represents Turkish (Ottoman Empire) in a different way. Her letters neither reproduce nor complicate Eurocentrism. Rather, these letters replace Eurocentrism by representing moments of cultural confrontations.
Reading Travel beyond Stereotype in William Coxe’s ‘Travels into Poland, Russia, Sweden and Denmark’
By Basundhara Chakraborty
His upper-class status turned into a disadvantage to Coxe as it prevented him from any inter-class encounter in his travel destinations and he failed to get any insight into the lives of the people inhabiting there. Highly impersonal in tone, Coxe’s travel writings though abound in factual information, contained relatively few personal anecdotes or reflections.
Gender Troubles When Gender Travels: Locating the Discursive Identities in Shivya Nath’s ‘The Shooting Star’
By Puja Chakraborty
The paucity of the female agency in travel narratives foregrounds a critical point pertaining to the gender issue. Women, in general, as mobile subjects are placed in a subservient position considering their physical and mental resilience in comparison to men.
The Travels and Travails of a Bengali: Reading Sanjib Chandra Chattopadhyay’s ‘Palamau’
By Stella Chitralekha Biswas
The anxieties surrounding the performance of ‘civilized’ masculinity, with the display of sheer courage and pragmatism, appear to be bearing down upon the ‘Saheb’ who is almost idolized by the ‘noble savage’ and his ‘uncivilized’ masculinity.
The kaleidoscopic journey of Kolkata through a sketch diary
By Sohomdeep Sinha Roy & Debika Banerji
An urban sketcher’s diary typically is his/her active engagement with the neighbourhood and the landscape through the visual interpretations of food, clothes, architecture, nature, and so on.
Nostalgia for the Past: Durga Pujo at my hometown
By Suparna Barman
Travelling has always been very personal to me. My travel journeys are filled with family trips to our grandparents' homes – my mother's place in Kerala and my father’s place in West Bengal, every alternate summer. Then, in the middle of the year, my parents would take me on short trips to Haridwar, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Nainital, etc.
Always on the Move: Stories of the Street Food Vendors at Police Bazaar, Shillong
By Richa Chilana & Rashi Bhargava
Having visited Police Bazaar at different times of the day, we realised that it is not only a marketplace that might offer insights into the changing dynamics of urban economy in a tourist destination but is also a space that is infused with meanings, metaphors and emotions.
Café Dissensus 