travel writing

CFP: Alternate Words: Language and Identity in German Transnational Literature and Cinema (Sep 30 2018; March 21-24 2019) - Session 17365  

50th Anniversary Convention: Northeastern Modern Language Association (NeMLA)

March 21-24, 2019

Washington, DC

Host Institution: Georgetown University

How material exchange and mobility affect people and their ideas? How do these subjects and these objects transform the place of destination and its practices, knowledge, texts, and understanding of the world? This panel will address the consequences of the mobility of subjects and the exchange of objects in the early modern world. Early modernity is a time strongly characterized by the increasing crossing of boundaries. In this sense, this panel wants to analyze how material exchange enables different cultures to cross borders and permeate different social spaces, modifying those who import them and those who export them.

“Edges of Transatlantic Commerce in the Eighteenth Century” 

This seminar explores how Europeans constructed the identities of non-European and non-Christian peoples in the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds. We invite papers that examine how Europeans racialized, sexualized, or in any way “othered” either Jews or Muslims in Southern Europe, the indigenous peoples of the Americas, or the peoples of North/West Africa that they encountered in Africa in addition to those encountered as slaves when traveling to the Caribbean and Central America. Renaissance and early modern European views of different peoples was closely connected to, and constructed by, prevailing ideas about gender and sexuality as well as notions of civilization and nature.

This is a guaranteed session that considers representations of travel in English Renaissance literature. Given the regular movement of persons and merchandise between England and Continental Europe and the incipient development of English interests in the New World, travel is central to the evolution of an English national identity. At the same time, an idea of travel profoundly subtends humanist models of education, which generally present their material as objects of translatio across time and place. This panel aims to explore how early modern writers conceptualize travel, and how they respond to travel’s capacity to register both physical and imaginative experiences.