Conferencia Internacional: "Tropics of Travel, Part 1: Departures", Universidad Ca’ Foscari, en Venecia. 13 – 15 Diciembre de 2007.
The Conference is part of a wider project that will take the form of four international symposia which will be held in Venice (2007), Paris (2008), London (2009) and Liège (2010). Each symposium will be devoted to one of the following tropes: 1) Departures 2) Encounters 3) Utopias and Dystopias 4) Homes.
Travel is arguably a central metaphor of man’s search for the right place in the world that has grounding in and impact on reality. Accounts of travel, fantastic or real, at home or abroad, are a familiar subject in cultures and literatures worldwide. Travel has been a staple narrative motif in Arabic writings. Tropics of Travel will examine travel not simply as a process, but as a central trope, a figurative matrix that drives quest for knowledge, geographical discovery, historical narratives, religious accounts of pilgrimage, spiritual journeys of transcendence, official records of diplomatic missions, literary journeys of transformation, and cross-cultural dialogues. It will, more particularly, explore the importance of new forms of knowledge created through the mediation of travel in the definitions of identity, community and home. The Project will look at factual or fictional Arabic writings that take ‘travel’ as its main theme or motif from a comparative and multi-disc
iplinary perspective so as to involve scholars of literature, geography, history, anthropology, religious studies, art, art history and cultural studies.
Tropics of Travel, Part 1 : Departures
Scientific Committee: Abdelfattah Kilito (Université de Rabat), Ferial Ghazoul (American University in Cairo), Eugenio Burgio (Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia).
Organizing Committee: Frédéric Bauden (Université de Liège), Aboubakr Chraïbi (INALCO, Paris), Antonella Ghersetti (Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia), Wen-Chin Ouyang (SOAS, London)
The first part of the Project (Departures) looks at the impulses and motives behind travel and re-examines familiar definitions of travel. It re-maps the trajectories of travel across time and space and relates mobility and wanderlust to knowledge and imagination. It explores the relation and tension between these and the negotiations that take place in the footsteps of the traveller. It also examines the ways in which the particular itinerary of travel gives shape and substance to narratives of travel.
* What motivates travel? Is it a matter of personal curiosity, such as search for knowledge? Is it commerce or accident? Or is it a question of adventure, of the need to be mobile, to be away from home?
* Does it have to do with the conditions of the community in which one lives, such as civil unrest, war, or poverty? What of pilgrimage and diplomatic missions?
* What role do motives play in choice, or lack thereof, of destination? What kinds of knowledge inform these motives? In what ways does the choice of destination determine itinerary of travel and the material culture that accompanies travellers?
* What impact does this itinerary have on travel writing?
* In what ways does wanderlust, the desire for mobility, structure fantastic and documentary narratives of travel?
* What can wanderlust tell us about the tension between individual rights and communal demands, between freedom and stability, and between verisimilitude and imagination?
* How are homesickness, nostalgia and exile accounted for? What role do they have in giving shape to travel texts?
* What is the projection, if any, of hope or fear upon place, whether the one left behind or the one arrived at?
* Does departure enhance or diminish the deficiency represented by the place left behind? In what ways does this enhanced or diminished deficiency leave its traces in the narrative or text?
Those who wish to participate are kindly requested to send an abstract of no more than 500 words or one A4 page (double-spaced) to Antonella Ghersetti (antghers@unive.it) before the end of September 2006. A circular containing more details on the organisation of the Conference will be sent to those whose papers have been accepted.
Presentations should last 30 minutes; they will be followed by discussion and questions. The official languages of the conference will be English and French. However, papers written in another European language will be accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the Conference. Papers to be submitted for publication should not exceed 8000 words; they will be peer-refereed.