Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement

by Caren Kaplan, Stanley Fish (Editor)

Contemporary theory is replete with metaphors of travel—displacement, diaspora, borders, exile, migration, nomadism, homelessness, and tourism to name a few. In Questions of Travel , Caren Kaplan explores the various metaphoric uses of travel and displacement in literary and feminist theory, traces the political implications of this “traveling theory,” and shows how various discourses of displacement link, rather than separate, modernism and postmodernism.
Addressing a wide range of writers, including Paul Fussell, Edward Said, James Clifford, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, Gayatri Spivak, Edward Soja, Doreen Massey, Chandra Mohanty, and Adrienne Rich, Kaplan demonstrates that symbols and metaphors of travel are used in ways that obscure key differences of power between nationalities, classes, races, and genders. Neither rejecting nor dismissing the powerful testimony of individual experiences of modern exile or displacement, Kaplan asks how mystified metaphors of travel might be avoided. With a focus on theory’s colonial discourses, she reveals how these metaphors continue to operate in the seemingly liberatory critical zones of poststructuralism and feminist theory. The book concludes with a critique of the politics of location as a form of essentialist identity politics and calls for new feminist geographies of place and displacement.

Genres: Travel, Theory, Nonfiction, Academic, Philosophy

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Caren Kaplan is Professor of American Studies at the University of California, Davis, and the author and editor of several books including Life in the Age of Drone Warfare, also published by Duke University Press.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caren_K...

Reviews

[Sfgrace · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this a few years ago during my dissertation on the radical anticolonial potentials & epistemologies of contemporary itinerant people, from oogles to mobile home/trailer park residents to migrant workers to #vanlife people. It helped me to understand the nature of itinerancy much more deeply than I had before, of course, but it also made the arguments that Baudrillard, Deleuze, & Guattari make much clearer. It also became the focal point for my critiques of their work, building off Kaplan's critique of their inability to fully conceive of the struggles of refugees and itinerant/stateless/landless peoples because of the limitations of colonial imagination and colonial metaphor. It linked seamlessly with Arendt's discussion on the failures of imagination when facing with atrocity and, in my opinion, also supported Hartman's writings on the limitations of empathy when considering the atrocities of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the slave markets of the 19th Century in the so-called United States.

All in all, it's my favorite nonfiction book and the third most cited work in my dissertation (after Jean Baudrillard & Derek Bell, & ahead of Noel Ignatiev)

[Shawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Only read the Intro/First Chapter for class, but this book is very enlightening in its exploration of how travel and the traveler has been interpreted and used throughout (post)modernity.