Travel Writing

WORKSHOP

TTrraavveell WWrriittiinngg Practice, Pedagogy and Theory

24-25 February 2011

III

Groyon

Vicente

© Workshop on Travel Writing: Practice, Pedagogy and Theory (24‐25 February 2011) organised by Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore at the ARI Seminar Room, Tower Block, Level 10, Bukit Timah Road

Critical attention to travel writing has grown significantly over the last three decades. Described as a genre that defies categorization, travel texts have long unsettled the conventions of literature, anthropology, history, and geography. Yet despite the varied ways of investigating travel narratives, studies agree on essential elements—the motif of departures and arrivals, the traversal of space, the contact/clash of cultures, the inner/outer journey, the foregrounding of the strange vis‐à‐vis the familiar. These have been mined, largely through the lens of literary and cultural studies, for insights they can provide into structures of power, mobility, representation, knowledge production, cultural dialogue and, more recently, the theme of reconciliation.

As the recent years witnessed the formal establishment of travel writing studies into the academe, there has emerged a greater need to explore the varied facets underlying the genre’s production, and how they bear on each other. This has become more urgent as the interest in the phenomenon of travel itself has necessarily been imbricated in more current inquiries such as globalization, migration, tourism, gender studies, digitalization, and international studies. Alongside this development is a keener awareness of how the practice, pedagogy and theorizing of travel narratives are no longer perceived as distinct from each other if more socio‐culturally responsive, rewarding and innovative ways of articulating travel experiences are to be encouraged.

This workshop addresses the need to create more productive occasions into the critical inquiry of travel texts through a dialogue among writers, teachers and theorists. It is hoped that by articulating issues thought to be loosely related from each other, new sites of interaction, even collision, can be teased out through the exchange. It also aims to explore how debates assumed to be integral in earlier studies of travel texts may unravel into new strands of investigation as the global political and economic shifts that highlight Asia’s rise are considered.

Participating in the workshop are award‐winning writers, leading figures in the study of travel writing, and academics working on related fields.

CONTACT DETAILS

Organisers:

Prof Chua Beng Huat Asia Research Institute & Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore

Assoc Prof Dinah Roma Sianturi Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

Secretariat:

Ms Valerie Yeo Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore 469A Tower Block, Level 10, Bukit Timah Road, Singapore 259770 Email: [email protected] Tel: (65) 6516 5279 Fax: (65) 6779 1428

Workshop on Travel Writing: Practice, Pedagogy and Theory (24‐25 February 2011) organised by Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore at the ARI Seminar Room, Tower Block, Level 10, Bukit Timah Road

THURSDAY, 24 FEBRUARY 2011 09:00 – 09:15 REGISTRATION & REFRESHMENT 09:15 – 09:30 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS CHUA Beng Huat Leader of the Cultural Studies in Asia Cluster, Asia Research Institute, Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore Dinah Roma SIANTURI Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore 09:30 – 11:00 SESSION 1 – WRITING SELF AND TRAVEL Chairperson: CHUA Beng Huat 09:30 Robin HEMLEY The Travel Writer as Infiltrator The University of Iowa, USA 10:00 Philip HOLDEN Death in a Time of War: Maugham, Travel, Writing National University of Singapore 10:30 DISCUSSION 11:00 – 11:30 TEA BREAK 11:30 – 13:00 SESSION 2 – PERMEABLE BOUNDARIES Chairperson: Naoko SHIMAZU 11:30 Vicente Garcia GROYON Traversing Fiction and Nonfiction in Travel Writing De La Salle University‐Manila, Philippines 12:00 Kyoko NAKAJIMA Travel Journals and Fiction Novelist, Japan 12:30 DISCUSSION 13:00 – 14:00 LUNCH 14:00 – 15:30 SESSION 3 – “THE EVE OF DEPARTURE”: WOMEN’S TRAVEL WRITINGS Chairperson: Tineke HELLWIG 14:00 Betty HAGGLUND The 'Bricolage' of Travel Writing: Nottingham Trent University, UK & A Bakhtinian Reading of Nineteenth‐Century University of Birmingham, UK Women's Writings about Italy 14:30 Stephanie Elizondo GRIEST Wayward Women, On the Road and On the Page University of Iowa, USA 15:00 DISCUSSION 15:30 – 16:00 TEA BREAK 16:00 – 18:00 SESSION 4 – ASIAN JOURNEYS Chairperson: Leo CHING 16:00 Lilawati KURNIA Travel Writing on Indonesia and by Indonesians Universitas Indonesia 16:30 Naoko SHIMAZU War Diaries as Travel Writing: Japanese Conscripts and National University of Singapore their Discovery of ‘Japan’ in the Russo‐Japanese War 17:00 ZHENG Yi Xu Xiake and Xiake Youji National University of Singapore 17:30 DISCUSSION 18:00 END OF DAY ONE 18:10 BUS TRANSFER Please gather at the lobby for the bus transfer to dinner venue 18:30 WORKSHOP DINNER (For Speakers, Chairpersons & Invited Guests) 20:00 BUS TRANSFER BACK TO HOTEL 3

FRIDAY, 25 FEBRUARY 2011 09:15 – 09:30 REGISTRATION & REFRESHMENTS 09:30 – 11:00 SESSION 5 – MOVING DISPUTED BORDERS Chairperson: Thongchai WINICHAKUL 09:309 Tim YOUNGS Ethical Commitment: Travel Writing and Critics Nottingham Trent University, UK 10:00 Carol E. LEON Travel Lines and Places of Belonging University of Malaya, Malaysia 10:30 DISCUSSION 11:00 – 11:30 TEA BREAK 11:30 – 13:00 SESSION 6 – TOWARDS A GLOBAL ITINERARY Chairperson: Peter MAROLT 11:30 Eddie TAY Encounters, Stereotypes and the Cosmopolitan The Chinese University of Hong Kong Imagination: Travel Writing from Singapore 12:00 Dinah Roma SIANTURI From Colonial to Cosmopolitan Visions: National University of Singapore Detours in Travel Theory 12:30 DISCUSSION 13:00 – 14:00 LUNCH 14:00 – 15:30 SESSION 7 – OF THE SACRED AND PROFANE Chairperson: Maureen Helen HICKEY 14:00 Ana Maria Theresa P. LABRADOR Pilgrimage or Tourism: What’s The Difference? National Museum of the Philippines 21st Century Mass Visits to Sacred Spaces and their Implications on Heritage Preservation 14:30 Joanna Claire COOK Shopping, Merit‐making and Meditating: National University of Singapore Spiritual Tourism in Contemporary Thailand 15:00 DISCUSSION 15:30 – 16:00 CLOSING REMARKS Dinah Roma SIANTURI Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore 16:00 END OF DAY TWO 16:00 – 16:30 TEA BREAK 16:30 BUS TRANSFER BACK TO HOTEL

The Travel Writer as Infiltrator

Robin HEMLEY Director, Nonfiction Writing Program, The University of Iowa Nonfiction Editor, The Iowa Review Editor, Defunct (Defunctmag.com)

robin‐[email protected]

This paper will examine the fraught space between outsiders to a culture, and how writers throughout the centuries have gained access and insight into cultures not their own. The paper will also explore the relationship of the Self to the country of exploration – while in the past, the notion of the Self was considered a stable identity, that’s certainly not the case in the 21st century, and in many regards, the Country of the Self is what the true traveler explores. In my discussion we’ll examine cultural outsiders who become obsessed with a culture not their own (myself in relation to the Philippines), cultural spies such as Victorian writer Sir Richard Burton’s infiltration of Mecca in the 19th century, and former insiders (expats and émigrés) looking back at the land of their birth, as in Luis Francia’s book about the Philippines, Eye of the Fish. Other authors discussed will be Jan Morris, James Hamilton‐Paterson, Joan Didion and Jhumpa Lahiri. In an ever more globally accessible world, the audience for the travel writer has jumped the tracks – instead of an assumed audience “back home,” the contemporary travel writer’s audience and popularity might include and even be made up mostly of the people to whom he’s a foreigner, as was the case when I wrote my “Dispatches From Manila” column for McSweeney’s, and I soon found an audience in the Philippines and in the Filipino Diaspora. The value for the Filipino audience was the opportunity to have aspects of their culture reflected back honestly and respectfully by an informed outsider. The value to myself was immeasurable in the way I was able to interrogate my own notions of culture, politics, and where and when I as an outsider could take a seat at the table.

Robin Hemley is the author of seven award‐winning books of nonfiction and fiction, including Invented Eden: The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday; Turning Life into Fiction, Do‐Over: In Which a Forty‐Eight Year Old Father of Three Returns to Kindergarten, Summer Camp, the Prom, and Other Embarrassments, Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness, The Last Studebaker: A Novel, and two short story collections. His book on Immersion Writing, Out in The World will be published by The University of Georgia Press next year, as will a new volume of short stories. He is the Director of The Nonfiction Writing Program at The University of Iowa, and teaches in the low‐residency MFA Programs at City University in Hong Kong and Vermont College of Fine Arts. He has won many awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his work has been widely anthologized.

Death in a Time of War: Maugham, Travel, Writing

Philip HOLDEN English Language & Literature and University Scholars Programme National University of Singapore

[email protected]

Over the last two years I’ve been working on a project that will eventually result in a biographical account of the life of the British writer W. Somerset Maugham. Maugham was an accomplished traveler and travel writer, and indeed probably never spent a calendar year in a single location from the age of sixteen to his death at ninety‐one in 1965. Biographies of Maugham have often focused on his sexuality, attempting to discover the truth of self hidden beneath the elaborate fabrications and thin fictionalizations of his published writing. In re‐reading Maugham, I’ve become more interested in the way he consciously, through the cultivation of celebrity, made his life into a work of art: how he transformed episodes of travel into journeys. In doing so, I’ve also moved from a postcolonial critique of Maugham—which I think is important, but perhaps increasingly less intellectually relevant—to considering how his works circulated among a global reading public. In my paper, after a brief framing discussion, I’ll read a section of the biography I am writing, which centers on the death of Maugham’s secretary and partner, Gerald Haxton, and which is told using a motif of intersecting journeys. In exploring the possibilities of narrativization offered by Maugham’s life, I’m curious about the manner in which approaching biography as an exercise in travel writing helps us reconceptualize biography itself as a genre.

Philip Holden researches life writing and Southeast Asian writing in English, often with a focus on issues relating to gender and multiculturalism. He is the author of Autobiography and Decolonization: Modernity, Masculinity, and the Nation‐State (2008) and co‐author of The Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English (2009), as well as articles in Postcolonial Studies, Interventions, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Biography, Life Writing, Philippine Studies and Textual Practice. His present research examines the place of the short story as a global form under decolonization, and he is also doing preliminary work on a literary biography of W. Somerset Maugham.

Traversing Fiction and Nonfiction in Travel Writing

Vicente Garcia Groyon Department of Literature, De La Salle University‐Manila, Philippines

[email protected]

Contemporary nonfiction routinely adopts techniques traditionally used in the writing of fiction as a way of making reality come alive on the page. This crossover reinforces poststructuralist and postmodern notions of the fictiveness of any mediated renditions of reality, and in the travel essay results in a depiction of an existing geographical location and an actual experience of that location that are as fictional as settings and events in a novel. Even as a writer absorbs the details of a place and attends to the sensations of being in that place, he is already shaping them into the essay he is going to write in the same way that he works with elements from his imagination. Snatches of conversation are worked into potential scenes as dialogue, turns of phrase are coined for vivid descriptions of sensation, and itineraries are reduced to summaries, in a process that traverses the permeable boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. In this paper, this process is explored through an examination of how this writer approached a recent travel essay assignment on the Spain of poet Miguel Hernández.

Vicente Garcia Groyon has written a novel, The Sky over Dimas (De La Salle University Press, 2003), and a short story collection, On Cursed Ground and Other Stories (University of the Philippines Press, 2004), both of which received the Manila Critics Circle National Book Award for Fiction. He recently edited a Philippine PEN anthology of new fiction in English entitled A Different Voice: Fiction by Young Filipino Writers and two anthologies of flash fiction entitled Very Short Stories for Harried Readers and Mga Kuwentong Paspasan. In 2009 he received an Honorary Fellowship from the University of Iowa International Writing Program. He teaches with the Department of Literature at De La Salle University‐Manila.

Travel Journals and Fiction

Kyoko NAKAJIMA Novelist, Japan

[email protected]‐net.ne.jp

This paper will focus on the interaction between travel journals and fiction from a practical aspect.

Travel non‐fiction is mostly written from the traveler’s point of view. When people travel and see many things, they are also being seen. For a long period, travelers from Western countries were observers for non‐Western countries. Then they wrote what they saw one‐sidedly. But this situation is now considered history because presently non‐ Western writers can write from their perspective.

My second novel Ito’s Romance is based on a travel account called Unbeaten Tracks in Japan written by Isabella Bird, a Victorian traveler who came to Japan in the late 19th century. The protagonist of my novel is her interpreter, a young Japanese man. To reverse the point of view gives a more diversified idea—for example, we can realize the prejudice we have, and also we become aware of our differences and similarities. When you see someone, someone may also be watching you. Simply it is fun to think that an observer is also observed.

Thus travel writing itself can inspire another form of travel writing. I think it is an interesting way to have intertextuality between travel journals and travel fiction because the novel is a form which contains polyphony.

Kyoko Nakajima is an author of six collections of short stories and four novels. She started her career as a novelist with FUTON in 2003. The book was nominated for the Noma Literature Prize for new writers. Her second novel Ito no koi (Ito’s Romance) and 2 other books were also nominated for domestic literary prizes. She was one of the participants for the International Writing Program in University of Iowa, 2009. In 2010, she published a novel Chiisai O‐uchi (The Little House). It won the 143rd Naoki Prize, the time‐honored literary prize for seasoned writers of popular fiction in Japan. The novel was highly regarded that the writing vividly depicted the life of a middle‐class family in prewar Japan and the author took in huge volumes of reference materials very tactfully. Chiisai O‐uchi will be translated into Chinese and Korean, published from publishing companies in Beijing and Seoul respectively.

The 'Bricolage' of Travel Writing: A Bakhtinian Reading of Nineteenth‐Century Women's Writings about Italy

Betty HAGGLUND Department of English, Nottingham Trent University, UK Centre for Postgraduate Quaker Studies, University of Birmingham, UK

[email protected]

Accounts of travel in Italy written by women during the period 1810‐1830 are strikingly intertextual. Harriet Morton's Protestant Vigils; or, Evening Records of A Journey in Italy, in the Years 1826 and 1827 (1829), for example, directly draws on and/or quotes from at least sixty‐two other texts, including classical sources in translation, contemporary books on Italy, poetry, other travel accounts, the Bible, encyclopaedias and other reference books, scientific papers, etc. Similarly, Maria Graham's Three Months Passed in the Mountains East of Rome, during the Year 1819 (1820) makes use of at least sixty‐six texts, only a few of which overlap with the ones used by Morton and which include Latin, French and Italian texts, Graham being fluent in all three languages.

This paper will explore the ways in which these and other women travel writers of the early nineteenth century write a type of 'bricolage', drawing on and transforming a wide range of material in ways that take it far beyond twenty‐ first century concepts of 'copying' or 'quotation'. It will look at how this layering of textuality is situated within contemporary approaches to female authorship and text, reflected in, inter alia, the growth in anthologies and periodical reviewing practices, and will contextualise it within a discussion of the ways in which texts were both produced and consumed while travelling abroad.

It will go on to examine the ways in which these women travel writers strove to create an authoritative voice within their texts and will look at the ways in which the multiple voices within the texts both 'disrupt' and support the authority of the female authorial voice.

Betty Hagglund is an Honorary Research Fellow in English at Nottingham Trent University, UK and has recently taken up a post as Project Development Officer at the Centre for Postgraduate Quaker Studies, University of Birmingham, UK, where she is beginning to develop ways in which to analyse and write about religiously motivated travel writing. She is the author of Tourists and Travellers: Women's Non‐Fictional Writing about Scotland, 1770‐1830 (Bristol: Channel View Publications, 2010), and has edited three volumes of women's Italian travel writing (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010), the seventeenth‐century manuscript travel diary of Cassandra Willoughby (forthcoming 2012) and Catherine Hutton's The Tour of Africa (forthcoming 2013). She is co‐editor of Snapshot Traveller, an international online newsletter for the academic study of travel writing and served as Vice‐President of the International Society for Travel Writing from 2001‐2005. She has published widely on travel writing, and has a particular interest in women's writing.

Wayward Women, On the Road and On the Page

Stephanie Elizondo GRIEST University of Iowa

stephanie‐[email protected]

Neither the road nor the market place has ever seemed as open for women travel writers. Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love spent 57 weeks at the No. 1 spot on the New York Times paperback nonfiction best‐seller list, got translated into 30 languages, and became a movie starring Julia Roberts. The San Francisco publisher Travelers’ Tales boasts an entire line of women‐themed travel books that far outsell its “gender‐neutral” catalogue. Blogs like WanderlustAndLipstick and websites like JourneyWoman and TangoDiva abound. But how does the field look from the ground?

Stephanie Elizondo Griest will share her perspective, based on 15 years of orbiting the globe (and publishing four books about it). She will discuss the issues women travel writers routinely face on the road, from navigating conservative social norms to using perceived vulnerabilities to their advantage. What are the ethics of smoking sheesha with the men while the women are clearing the table? How can sexual advances be gracefully—and safely— thwarted? Under what circumstances should tear ducts be deployed?

After exploring the ways in which gender can impact a journey, Elizondo Griest will ruminate on how it shapes a narrative, particularly when the goal is securing a sale with a New York City publishing house. Why are men encouraged to pump their stories with action, facts, and figures, while women must incorporate memoiristic elements such as soul‐baring and reflection? Elizondo Griest will also meditate on obstacles faced by writers of color. How do local perceptions of race or ethnicity affect a traveler’s journey? What role can social justice play in a travel narrative?

Handouts will include a list of publication venues that feature women’s travel writing as well as recommended reading.

Stephanie Elizondo Griest is a globe‐trotting author and activist from South Texas. Her books include the award‐ winning travel memoirs Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana and Mexican Enough: My Life between the Borderlines as well as the best‐selling guidebook 100 Places Every Woman Should Go. She has also written for the New York Times, Washington Post, and Texas Monthly, and edited the 2010 volume of the annual anthology Best Women’s Travel Writing. As a correspondent for The Odyssey, she once drove 45,000 miles across the United States for an educational website. Awards include a Henry Luce Scholarship to China, a yearlong residency at Princeton University, the Margolis Award for Social Justice Reporting, and the Gold Prize for Best Book in the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition. She is a MFA Candidate in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Visit her website at www.aroundthebloc.com.

Travel Writing on Indonesia and by Indonesians

Lilawati KURNIA German Department and Cultural Studies Master Programme Faculty of Humanities, Universitas Indonesia

[email protected]

The archipelago which is now called Indonesia and consists more than 13.000 islands was already known to the european seaman in the 17th and 18th century. European travellers, scientists of the 18th century, and also travel‐ writers came to the islands. These literature about the Indonesian islands become a guidebook for the travellers and writers from the 2nd half of the 19th century until early 20th century. The research that was done in my dissertation is about the involvement of Germans in VOC’s (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie) activities and their coming to the archipelago. There were at least 4 Governor‐Generals who were originally from German, e.g. Baron von Imhoff, scientists like Junghuhun, Rumphius in Ambon, Carl Reinwardt who established the botanical gardens, and also artists like Walter Spies who settled in Bali and was visited by other world artists such as Charlie Chaplin and the writer Vicky Baum. My dissertation took 4 novels which were written by Germans who have visited Indonesia. Drawing from the theoretical framework of Peter Brenner, there are at least four categories of travel‐writing: a journal or scientific writing about the travel, a diary or a report of the travel, a fictional work inspired by the journey, and a guidebook or informational text about the travel itself.

It turns out that, the Indonesians were also fond of travelling, in the 16/17th century a person called Bujangga Manik from West Java walked on foot to East Java and wrote about his impressions and objects he saw along the way. In addition, people of Islamic faith who could, must travel far and wide on the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Two people from different ethnic backgrounds ‐one Bataknese and one Javanese‐ wrote about this journey. There are also those who underwent the journey because it was their lifelong dream‐ as such can be read from the books of Karl May. Writer Seno Gumira Ajidarma often travels as a journalist; one of his books is an essay with photos of the nine Wali (guardian/saint) who were considered as the pioneers of Islam in Java. The research regarding writings of Indonesian travellers have also noted the existence of literary works that are produced through contemplation or impression of the journeys. However, the research is not yet completed and for that very reason I would like to delve further into the matter.

Lilawati Kurnia teaches at German Department and Cultural Studies Master Programme at the Faculty of Humanities, Universitas Indonesia. She obtained her PhD at the Faculty of Humanities, UI and Her Magister Artium from Gesamthochschule Kassel, Germany. She has published several articles i.a. “Api dalam Ingatan. Memori Kolektif dalam Puisi Sapardi Djoko Damono”, in: Anthology “Membaca Sapardi”, Obor Publisher, 2010; “Goethe and the Multicultural Aspect of World Literature,” Jurnal Susastra 4, June 2007; “The Art of Culinary, Power and Multiculturalism in “Master Cooking Boy”/The Real Master Cooking Boy, by Etsushi Ogawa.” “Wacana”, Vol. 8, No.2 October 2006, pages 202‐220; World Literature in the Discourse of Goethe and the Relevance with World Globalization,” “Jurnal Susastra” Magazine, HISKI Journal, Vol.1. N0.3, 2006; Transitition of Balinese Culture in the Novel “Wayan Zwischen Drogen und Dämonen“, Wacana Magazine, Obor Publisher, April 2006. She also translate in her free time and has published: English‐Bahasa Indonesia Ruang Publik, Identitas dan Memori Kolektif: Jakarta Pasca‐Suharto (pengarang: Abidin Kusno), Penerbit: Ombak, Yogyakarta, 2009; and two german childern books published by Obor publisher(Penerbit: Obor, Jakarta 2008.)

War Diaries as Travel Writing: Japanese Conscripts and their Discovery of ‘Japan’ in the Russo‐Japanese War

Naoko SHIMAZU Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

[email protected]

During the Russo‐Japanese War of 1904‐5, over one million Japanese conscripts were mobilized. Many of them left records of their extraordinary experiences as war diaries. One of the most revealing aspects of their writing is the discovery of ‘Japan’ through their mobilization as they leave their hometowns and embark on the railway journey through Japan to the port of embarkation in Kure near Hiroshima. This paper will argue that the ‘journey of farewell’ as they travelled through Japan had a transformative effect on their sense of the self, as they gained gradually the sensibility of what it meant to be a ‘Japanese’ soldier.

Naoko Shimazu is currently a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at ARI, and Reader in Japanese History, Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck College, University of London. She has published widely on modern Japanese history, and is the author of Japanese Society at War: Death, Memory and the Russo‐Japanese War (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Nationalisms in Japan (editor, Routledge, 2006), and Japan, Race and Equality: The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919 (Routledge, 1998). Her new project is a cultural history of diplomacy, focusing on the Bandung Conference of 1955.

Xu Xiake and Xiake Youji

ZHENG Yi Arts Faculty, the University of Sydney Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

[email protected]

The paper studies the intersection between transformations of travel genres as established literati belletrist forms and the development of motion, both conceptually and methodologically, as a necessary component in the emergent empiricist knowledge formation in Late Ming and early Qing China (1520‐1750). Concentrating on the travel notes (Xiake Youji) of the literatus‐knower Xu Hongzu (1586‐1641) and his routes of geographic and epistemological explorations, I will try to understand the significant changes in travelling and geographic knowledge, but more importantly in how motion itself becomes a value in the process of moving and knowing. This study will be contextualized in the world and knowledge changes related to the new possibilities and scale of motion developing from the early modern global economic and cultural network.

Zheng Yi is a Senior Research Fellow at the Arts Faculty, the University of Sydney. She received her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. Since then she has researched and taught modern Chinese literature, comparative cultural studies and intellectual history in the US, Germany, Israel and Australia. She has held fellowships from the Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute for Advanced Studies), Berlin; Collegium Budapest (Institute for Advanced Studies), Budapest; and the Porter Institute for Comparative Poetics, Tel Aviv. Her areas of research interest include: Comparative and Chinese intellectual history, cultural history, aesthetics; Modern (including early modern) literary culture, scientific culture; Contemporary cultural forms and historical contexts. She is currently a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.

Ethical Commitment: Travel Writing and Critics

Tim YOUNGS Nottingham Trent University

[email protected]

Over the past thirty years or so, travel writing has been the subject of increased academic attention, much of it from postcolonial and feminist scholars. Travel texts from earlier periods have been analysed by many to show that far from being objective and value‐free records of other cultures, societies and landscapes, they in fact transmit (even if they are sometimes in tension with) dominant ideologies. Such criticism often proceeds from a conviction that the critic or theorist holds a morally superior position to the traveller, whose attitudes towards ‘race’ and gender, especially, are held up for condemnation. My paper will present some of this criticism, with examples (mainly from the nineteenth century) of the kind of writing that has provoked it and that can be seen to function in the service of imperial and patriarchal power. Less remarked upon, however, and the subject of the second part of my paper, is the stated or implied superiority of some critical and theoretical positions over others. I shall examine some expressions of this and ask whether they constitute a self‐definition against others that is analogous to the processes observed in travel writing itself.

Tim Youngs is Professor of English and Travel Studies at Nottingham Trent University, where in 2003 he set up the Centre for Travel Writing Studies. In 1997 he founded the journal Studies in Travel Writing, which he continues to edit, and which from 2009 has been published 4 times per year by Routledge. His books include Travellers in Africa (1994), The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (ed. with Peter Hulme, 2002), and (ed.) Travel Writing in the Nineteenth Century (2006). He is currently writing The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing and working on a multi‐volume anthology of critical works on travel writing for Routledge/Taylor & Francis. He was associate editor, with responsibility for travel writing, on the 7th edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature (2010). He publishes mainly on travel writing after 1900.

Travel Lines and Places of Belonging

Carol E. LEON University of Malaya

[email protected]

My paper revisits the key issues raised in my book entitled Movement and Belonging: Lines, Places, and Spaces of Travel in which I explore concepts of self, other, place and space within the context of travel and movement. Underlying the discussion is the notion of belonging and the ways one can find a sense of self in an increasingly fragmented world.

Movement and Belonging: Lines, Places, and Spaces of Travel put forward the idea that place/ space and travel share a reciprocal relationship. Indeed the discourse of spatiality is a discourse of travel and travel lines create places and spaces which ultimately define the self. Within the vital but fluctuating linkages between self and place, some sense of belonging can be procured. The act of travel is encoded in geometrical figures of lines, surfaces, contours and triangulations, in short arrangements in a spatial context. The theoretical framework of the book derives from the fundamental idea that travel is the movement that inheres in lines of travel. When travel lines are nomadic they cause fissures in boundaries of representation and this, the book contends, makes for authentic and ethical travel. True travel lies in the passage between the point of departure and the point of arrival, and in the fluidity of the passage between these points. The travel texts analyzed in my book focus on the Indian Ocean region. The countries in this region are postcolonial spaces in the process of decolonization. At the same time, they are tilting to the global‐space economy of capitalism. The authors in the travel narratives discussed are constantly negotiating the spaces from where they speak and the places that they encounter.

I believe that in these uncertain times, when place and space have become empty signs and a sense of belonging is hard to experience, travel lines could become a literary matrix to evoke sites of definition and belonging.

Carol E. Leon is Associate Professor of English at the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur. She received her Ph. D in travel literature from the Australian National University. She is the author of Movement and Belonging: Lines, Places, and Spaces of Travel (2009). Her fields of research are contemporary travel writings and postcolonial literature and she has published articles and chapters in these areas.

Encounters, Stereotypes and the Cosmopolitan Imagination: Travel Writing from Singapore

Eddie TAY Department of English, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

[email protected]

In Singaporean literature, there is an emerging body of travel writing and fictional works of travel literature that critique assumptions, norms and boundaries of national life. Yet even as these texts are looking back upon Singapore, they are extending their gaze to other nations. In such moments of encounters with unfamiliar people and places, there emerge points of anxiety whereby the narrator realizes that historical and cultural knowledge as authorized by the Singaporean nation are no longer privileged sites of identity construction. In this paper, I examine moments in texts where stereotypes are points of departure for an emerging cosmopolitanism consciousness. Yet the texts succeed to varying degrees. Some are more effective than others in the way they engage with stereotypes. While some acknowledge their own limits of understanding, others embrace a set of stereotypes that circulates in transnational routes of capitalist production.

I argue that one of the key issues in contemporary travel writing is to document one’s encounters with others without reproducing an image of the other that lends itself to easy appropriation for various nationalist and corporatist agenda. I shall adapt from Martha C. Nussbaum’s consideration of Kant’s notion of cosmopolitanism, exploring the notion that the cosmopolitan imagination is an exilic imagination, in that one distances oneself from local, national and/or corporatist loyalties and lives apart from a social group that is like “a parent who will do his thinking for him” (Nussbaum “Kant and Cosmopolitanism” 35). Exile, of course, connotes a sense of hardship and suffering. However, it remains to be said that the travel writer in his or her writings is embarking on a form of internal exile, seeking to encounter others on their own terms.

Eddie Tay teaches creative writing at the Department of English, Chinese University of Hong Kong. His recent book is entitled Colony, Nation and Globalisation: Not at Home in Singaporean and Malaysian Literature (HKU Press, 2011). He is also the author of three poetry collections, the most recent being The Mental Life of Cities (2010). He is the reviews editor of the online quarterly journal Cha: An Asian Literary Journal founded in 2007.

At present, his research focuses on creative writing in English in Singapore and Hong Kong. The title of a recent journal article published in New Writing: The International Journal for the Theory and Practice of Creative Writing is “Multiculturalisms, Mistranslations and Bilingual Poetry: On Writing as a Chinese”. Another (co‐authored) article entitled “On Learning, Teaching and the Pursuit of Creative Writing in Singapore and Hong Kong” is forthcoming in the same journal.

From Colonial to Cosmopolitan Visions: Detours in Theory of Travel

Dinah Roma SIANTURI Asia, Research Institute, National University of Singapore

[email protected]

The critical literature on travel writing in 1990s, fueled by postcolonial critique, affirms the genre’s role in forging imperial discourses. Travel Writing, Form, and Empire: The Poetics and Politics of Mobility (2009) defines this narrative authority to represent “the Rest” as the dichotomy between mobility and stasis‐‐with mobility as the imperial body’s key attribute while its attendant value of curiosity morphs into a drive to describe, systemize and, hence, own knowledge.

The seeming progress of/in travel theory in the recent decade, however, has not stopped critics from asking the question: can the phenomenon of travel (and the narratives arising from it) shed its origins; do attempts at writing more culturally sensitive narratives confirm travel genre’s discursive maturity? In Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing (2007), Debbie Lisle asserts that underlying the veneer of civility are the old tropes of colonial travel narratives that are now employed in more sophisticated, humorous, and self‐deprecating tone.

The search for a “global reader” turns into a delusive goal as one negotiates the continuum from colonial to cosmopolitan visions. Given this framework, the paper reflects on some of the detours in recent travel theory: Has the genre reached its level of discontent? Has the genre in fact exhausted itself? Has the contemporary liberalization of travel and mobility ruptured the conventional modes of travel writing? Or, does the current critical preoccupation with travel theory define more the indubitable hurdles it is up against than the possibilities of it divesting itself of its old taint? Where is travel theory's next destination?

Dinah Roma Sianturi is an Associate Professor of Literature at De La Salle University and is currently on a two‐year research fellowship at the National University of Singapore Asia Research Institute to finish the book A Trail Out of the Dark: Philippine Colonial Travel Narratives, 1900‐1930s. Her geographic area of interest also includes Japan on which she has done studies (through the support of the Japanese Ministry of Education and the Japan Foundation) on its postwar film and cinema, and the discourse of nostalgia on contemporary travel narratives on Japan. Her most recent work inquires into how Japan is re‐envisioned in contemporary Southeast Asian fiction. For her creative works, her first book A Feast of Origins (UST, 2004) was given the National Book Award for Literature by the Manila Critics’ Circle while her collection of poems Geographies of Light (2007) won a Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for Literature.

Pilgrimage or Tourism: What’s The Difference? 21st Century Mass Visits to Sacred Spaces and their Implications on Heritage Preservation

Ana Maria Theresa P. LABRADOR National Museum of the Philippines

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The paper will focus on the 21st century visits to places that is still being used as sacred sites and destinations of pilgrimages. I am interested in the consequences of mass tourism as the market and its logistics become more accessible to visitors. As a museologist, I am concerned with the possibilities of making collections accessible to the point of having people queue to see exhibitions. It is one way of gauging a museum or heritage sites’ success.

However, on a more practical level, current scientific research indicates that more visitors to heritage sites are putting collections and ancient buildings at risk as visitors’ warm bodies, dirt brought in from their shoes and clothing as well as opening and closing of sites' doors, cause relative humidity and temperature to fluctuate and pollutants to increase. These considerations of agents of deterioration pose challenges for heritage sites especially those managing sacred spaces, perhaps in seeking a balance between preservation and openness? This balance is necessary as these living heritage places where devotees find significance in the objects, buildings and sites, must now compete for spaces with tourists who have more prosaic aims for their visits.

Besides my research on heritage conservation and access, I will include in this paper observations from the Wat Pho in Bangkok, Basilicas in Rome and other famous tourists sites that are also places of worship. It will investigate the effect of the popular Seven Wonders list especially those included in top twenty as well as those whose lives depend on these sites. Finally, as a case study I will present the challenges that Angkor Wat faces with 2 million visitors that visited it last year and the experience of parts of Angkor Wat in Cambodia that is open to the public.

Ana Maria Theresa P. Labrador is research associate for anthropology at the National Museum of the Philippines. She is received a 2010 Australian Leadership Awards Fellowship and undertook research from June to December to investigate the intersection of landscapes, heritage sites and post‐mining rehabilitation in Australia. The University of Cambridge in England awarded her an MPhil and PhD in Social Anthropology, focusing on ritual, museology and material culture. She also obtained a MA in Museum and Gallery Management from the City University London, UK. Dr Labrador has had extensive field experience, studying ethnicity, representation and material culture in Luzon (Philippines), and expatriate Filipinos in Southeast Asia and Europe. In 2009, she led a team of researchers in building a database to create a community‐based heritage tourism programme in Tayabas. She continues to work with Luzon communities in Tayabas (Quezon), San Fernando (La Union) and Magalang (Pampanga) to assist them with their heritage conservation needs and developing museums in their localities.

Shopping, Merit‐Making and Meditating: Spiritual Tourism in Contemporary Thailand

Joanna Claire COOK South East Asian Studies at Christ’s College, Cambridge Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

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This paper examines the promotion of meditation as a tourism activity for domestic tourists in Thailand. The increasing democratisation of lay meditation practice is leading to its incorporation into syncretic and multiple worlds. In combination with the promotion of sacred Thai pilgrimage sites and the development of meditation centres able to accommodated and teach large numbers of lay students, spiritual tourism structured around merit‐ making activities and meditation practice is increasing becoming an attractive activity for Thai tourists. Through ethnographic analysis and a consideration of the promotion literature developed by the Tourism Authority of Thailand this paper examines the repackaging of meditation and the multiple motivations of ‘good’ tourists.

Joanna Claire Cook is a George Kingsley Roth Research Fellow in South East Asian Studies at Christ’s College, Cambridge. She is currently a Visiting Research Fellow in the Religion and Globalisation Cluster, at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. She received both her PhD and M Phil in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. She has written and lectured on the Anthropology of Ethics, Asceticism, Religion, Buddhism, Fieldwork Methodology, the Gift and Gender. Her current research on the democratization of religious practice in Thailand explores the complex interplay between medical practice, internationalism and civil society. Dr Cook has a long‐standing research involvement with Thailand. Her earlier research focused on meditation as a monastic activity. Her recent monograph, published by Cambridge University Press, explores the subjective signification of monastic duties and ascetic practices focusing particularly on the motivation and experience of renouncers, the effect meditative practices have on individuals and community organization, and gender hierarchy within the context of the monastery.

LIST OF SPEAKERS & CHAIRPERSONS

NO. NAME ORGANISATION EMAIL ADDRESS 1. Ana Maria Theresa P. Anthropology, National Museum of the Philippines [email protected] Labrador 2. Betty Hagglund Dept of English, Nottingham Trent University, UK, [email protected] Centre for Postgraduate Quaker Studies, University of Birmingham, UK 3. Carol E. Leon University of Malaya [email protected] 4. Chua Beng Huat Asia Research Institute & Dept of Sociology [email protected] National University of Singapore 5. Dinah Roma Sianturi Asia Research Institute, [email protected] National University of Singapore 6. Eddie Tay Dept of English, [email protected] The Chinese University of Hong Kong 7. Hellwig Tineke Asia Research Institute, [email protected] National University of Singapore 8. Joanna Claire Cook South East Asian Studies, Christ’s College, UK [email protected] Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore 9. Kyoko Nakajima Novelist, Japan [email protected]‐net.ne.jp 10. Leo Ching Asia Research Institute, [email protected] National University of Singapore 11. Lilawati Kurnia German Dept and Cultural Studies Master [email protected], Programme, Universitas Indonesia [email protected] 12. Maureen Helen Hickey Asia Research Institute, [email protected] National University of Singapore 13. Naoko Shimazu Asia Research Institute, [email protected] National University of Singapore 14. Peter Marolt Asia Research Institute, [email protected] National University of Singapore 15. Philip Holden English Language & Literature and [email protected] University Scholars Programme, National University of Singapore 16. Robin Hemley Nonfiction Writing Program, The University of Iowa; robin‐[email protected] Nonfiction Editor, The Iowa Review; Editor, Defunct (Defunctmag.com) 17. Stephanie Elizondo Griest University of Iowa stephanie‐[email protected] 18. Thongchai Winichakul Asia Research Institute, [email protected] National University of Singapore 19. Tim Youngs Nottingham Trent University, UK [email protected] 20. Vicente Garcia Groyon Dept of Literature, [email protected] De La Salle University‐Manila, Philippines 21. Zheng Yi Asia Research Institute, [email protected] National University of Singapore