Travel Writing

WORKSHOP TTrraavveell WWrriittiinngg Practice, Pedagogy and Theory 24-25 February 2011 III Groyon G. 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 2 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 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 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 4 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 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

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