The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing

To what extent do bestselling travel books, such as those by Paul
Theroux, Bill Bryson, Bruce Chatwin and Michael Palin, tell us as
much about world politics as newspaper articles, policy documents and
press releases? Debbie Lisle argues that the formulations of genre,
identity, geopolitics and history at work in contemporary travel writing
are increasingly at odds with a cosmopolitan and multicultural world in
which ‘everybody travels’. Despite the forces of globalisation, common
stereotypes about ‘foreignness’ continue to shape the experience of
modern travel. The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing is
concerned with the way contemporary travelogues engage with, and try
to resolve, familiar struggles in global politics such as the protection of
human rights, the promotion of democracy, the management of
equality within multiculturalism and the reduction of inequality. This is
a thoroughly interdisciplinary book that draws from international
relations, literary theory, political theory, geography, anthropology and
history.

Created relation: the translated play in performance

Summary: The process of translation restores the materiality of time and space to a play. Performance, of course, takes place only within the here and now of an audience, but a play that comes from a different time or different place prompts an encounter with the conceptual and perceptual real from sometime or somewhere else. If we are to consider translation as an ethical practice, one concerned not only to present the dislocated other to the located self, but also to protect the other from wholesale assimilation by the self, then the translated play must in some ways prove resistant to such assimilation. But of course the retention of foreignness – or what Steiner called restitution – is problematic, not least because of the attendant danger of merely exoticising. The theatre of García Lorca in English presents an interesting case study in this regard.

Thou art a strange fellow:Dissonance and Discordance in Intercultural Shakespeares

Any performance of the intercultural necessarily, and always, advances the question of the cultural since it involves the inter-action and interplay of unique and particular cultural performance styles and modes. Intercultural theatre, according to Pavis, is a hybrid theatrical form “drawing upon performance traditions traceable to distinct cultural areas. The hybridization is very often such that the original forms can no longer be distinguished.” The result of this collaboration of forms is, however, often not a ‘hybrid’ where cultural texts work cohesively and in unison to produce a harmonious mise en scene. Instead, intercultural performances are performances at the interstices and at the intersections of cultures. They raise problems of authorship, authority and performance unities and expose a sense of cultural foreignness. Consequently, intercultural performance can be said to be meta-theatre that queries the construction of culture since it places alongside performance traditions that confront.

Music, as performative unit, is a significant line of action by which the intercultural spectacle is constructed. Integral to Western theatre, and certainly more so in traditional Asian performance forms, the deliberate ‘fusion’ and ‘blending’ of musical styles in intercultural performances underscore not a harmony of diverse sounds but the possible dissonance and discordance already performed by the visual and verbal texts. The paper thus seeks to examine, in particular, the musical elements in intercultural performances such as Ong Keng Sen’s Lear (Theatreworks, 1999) and explore the ways in which music could possibly intensify the confrontation of performative texts resulting in a disruption of performance unities. When watching and listening to Lear, the question of the ‘local’ thus arises not merely with identification and alienation from what is seen but also what is familiar and foreign to one’s ears.

Cosmopolitanism as the existential condition of humanity

Cosmopolitanism as the existential condition of humanity refers to the view that human beings are both transcendent and social. This is argued through another pair of concepts, commonality and difference. If humans are moral, it is because they recognise each other as sharing a basic ontology. But this morality is expressed in the sort of regard that separates ‘me’ from ‘you’. Two aspects of difference are elaborated: foreignness feared as alien but also found in oneself, and alterity as irreducibly other. How can these differences keep us both individual and social?