Review of International American Studies

On Voyaging and "Bildung" (The Case of Wellingborough/Redburn)

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Paweł Jędrzejko’s reflection on the career trajectories of Americanists from Eastern Bloc countries, including his own, spurs off his autoethnographic account of how sea sailing in Poland became a gateway to the world, leading to his involvement in Melville Studies. His chance encounter with the Polish training ship Zawisza Czarny in the Baltic Sea, marking the beginning of his Americanist journey, becomes a point of departure for a literary analysis, in which the author draws parallels between his own youthful experiences and those of Melville’s character Wellingborough Redburn. Exploring the character’s transatlantic journey in the context of the autobiographical characteristics of the genre of bildungsroman, Jędrzejko analyzes Redburn’s journey from
naïve boyhood to mature identity, emphasizing Melville’s use of Redburn’s voyage to Liverpool as a mirror of his own confrontation with reality, the collapse of inherited ideals, and the development of independent self-awareness. The author highlights the importance of direct (unmediated) experience in the shaping of one’s self-awareness, and poses questions concerning the reliability of narratives as “guides to reality.” By reflecting on the transformative nature of travel and the epistemological shifts it entails, Jędrzejko integrates his personal narrative with broader philosophical inquiries into identity formation, the fallibility of inherited knowledge, and the existential challenges faced by individuals in their pursuit of truth. The text serves as a meditation on the fluidity of discourse and the necessity of embracing uncertainty and impermanence as inextricable determinants of the human condition.

Introduction: On the Concept of Journeying

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The plethora of existing concepts of journeying, as explored by the authors of articles collected in the present issue of RIAS, reveals the multifaceted nature of travel, irreducible to physical mobility alone. Despite their differences, all forms of travel share common elements, including leaving home, facing risks, stepping out of comfort zones, and encountering logistical challenges, which renders journeying a significant component of existential experience. Involving aporetic encounters with the unfamiliar, travels allow for the deconstruction of stereotypes, offering not only opportunities for the revision of ossified perspectives, but also opening space for philosophical self-exploration. Literature and visual culture throughout different eras have captured these insights, from travel diaries and reports to cartographic works, paintings, photographs, and modern digital media such as travel vlogs and virtual reality. These records reflect the multidimensionality of the “truth” of their times, testifying to the material reality of a given time and place, but also revealing cultural prejudices and the particularities of the dominant discourse of the time. The authors of the texts in this volume reconstruct historical worlds, uncovering new aspects of literature and cultural artifacts, and offering fresh perspectives on travel and journeys as depicted in literary and visual narratives of the Americas since the Spanish Conquest until the first decades of the 21st-century.

"Gayl Jones and Travel No-Where"

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Gayl Jones (USA, b. 1949) writes of journeys throughout the Americas, while also, if implicitly, exploring a global African diaspora. Her epic historical novel Palmares (2021) focuses on Brazil, retelling the story of Zumbi, 17th-century Afro-Brazilian leader of a quilombo, or fortified rebel city. Palmares did finally fall to Portuguese colonial militias in 1694-5, and in her book Gayl Jones’s protagonist, Almeyda, then travels to what she hopes will be a new or second Palmares. Her journey, however, frustratingly and paradoxically seems to get her nowhere. But, as we will see, this nowhere reveals the No-Where of Palmarians’ lives, a placelessness that seems uncertain, but at the same time offers freedom, or at least imaginative space. Like legendary “flying Africans,” people who escaped enslavement by leaping into the air, Jones’s characters appear to launch themselves into an unknown, a Not-Know-Where that may take them to Africa or somewhere utterly unanticipated. We can find other versions of this ambiguous travel in Gayl Jones’s drama, The Ancestor: A Street
Play (1975; 2020), and her novel, The Birdcatcher (1986; 2022)—and even in the works of Toni Morrison, whose novels show similar concern with what Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation”: attempts to rethink history outside archives and beyond maps.

“Travelers by necessity” - Ruth Behar on the Way in Search of Roots or Home

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Ruth Behar, a Cuban-born immigrant to the US with Polish, Jewish, and Turkish background, begins her memoir Travelling Heavy. A Memoir In Between Journeys, published in 2013, with the following citation “I love to travel. But I’m also terrified of traveling” (3). Later she describes the “various good luck rituals” that she performs before starting a journey such as checking if she has her “Turkish evil eye bracelet,” “a handmade necklace […] to be protected from illness or sudden death” or “rubbing the turquoise glass beads to keep the plane from falling out of the sky” (3). She links all these habits to both her Jewish and Cuban ancestry. And although she calls herself a professional traveler, she also describes herself as a “an anthropologist who specializes in homesickness,” which perfectly reveals the contradictions related to the notion of travelling. As a relatively new phenomenon, available and affordable to few, travelling can be an exciting, desired and adventurous experience that opens us up to diversity and enriches us. At the same time since it involves meeting with the Other it can be a threatening and exhausting incident that causes nostalgia for home. Hence, the journey is an existential experience including the change, the philosophical exploration of oneself, search for and dissemination of knowledge, and a sense of discovery (actual of places and communities and symbolical of cultural values and ideas). In this paper I am going to analyze Behar’s writings as narratives representing fictitious fragments of experienced or/and imagined realities (Letters from Cuba 2020) vs. non-fictional dimension of memoir or travel writing (Travelling Heavy 2013). Still, what joins the two types of narratives is the issue of memory – how/what do we remember? How are our memories changing depending on time and person we relate them to?

The Land of Heathens versus the Land of Liberty. Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad and Ubeydullah Efendi’s Travels

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Mark Twain’s (1835-1910) literary travelogue, The Innocents Abroad (1869), remarks on and/or subverts previously established interpretations of places and objects. Twain’s adopted persona allows him to assume the double role of a fool and an intellectual, simultaneously, by deploying a peculiar type of humor. By openly distaining and emphasizing certain aspects of his travel experiences, Twain’s narrator seems naïve on one hand, but a savvy social critic on the other. Twain’s account of İstanbul (Constantinople) streets, drinking Turkish coffee, and Turkish bath experience become farcical descriptions of the Ottoman Empire. His choice of words—such as “the rustiest old barn in heathendom”—also confirms his ideological viewpoint of Ottoman lands. Unlike Twain, Ubeydullah Efendi (1858-1937), who travels in the opposite direction, to the United States from the Ottoman Empire, paints a positive picture of American urban life. He spends most of his time at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, which he describes in detail. One could argue that since the Ottoman Empire was on the cusp of becoming the Turkish Republic, Ubeydullah Efendi’s descriptions of his American voyage were naturally written in a progressive tone. Yet, a closer inspection reveals subtle criticism, as well as an awareness of how others viewed him as an Ottoman gentleman. Thus, his portrayals do not stem from internalized Orientalism; rather, they are the result of informed observations based on his cultural experiences. Both Mark Twain’s and Ubeydullah Efendi’s journalistic travel accounts to each other’s countries cannot be separated from the ideological and rhetorical dimensions of the era’s travel writing. This presentation will focus on both narrators’ approach and gaze in a comparative manner. While Twain portrays Ottoman lands in a hostile or condescending manner, with descriptors such as “filthy,” “brutish,” “ignorant,” or “unprogressive,” Ubeydullah Efendi’s accounts are not so one dimensional. Twain’s peculiar humor and narrative attitude were obviously influenced by the political events of the time, and his views were tainted by his orientalist approach. Conversely, Ubeydullah Efendi’s straightforward depictions, and occasional humor, are connected to his personality and offer a far more realistic portrayal of late nineteenth-century America.

A.K. Ramanujan’s Insightful Observations on Various Aspects of the United States of America. Looking Briefly at the Diary Entries

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Attipat Krishnaswamy Ramanujan (16 March 1929-13 July 1993) travelled extensively in peninsular India, collecting folktales from rural regions. Since he was already on the move, as a folklorist and as a teacher who taught in several colleges in South India consecutively, it wasn’t difficult for him to set sail for the United States of America when he received the Fulbright Travel Fellowship and Smith-Mundt Grant in 1959, to continue with his studies in linguistics. On 1 July 1959 he boarded the Strathaird in Bombay and undertook a land-journey through France to reach Southampton where he boarded the SS Queen Elizabeth which took him to New York on 28 July 1959. He wrote about experiences and observations during this journey in his “Travel Diary, 2 to 27 July 1959, Bombay to New York”, in the anthology Journeys: A Poet’s Diary (2018). The first-ever travel overseas, to the US, was full of excitement and anxiety for the young man of thirty. This journey was the initiation for his passage to the country he was to inhabit for the rest of his life, as a teacher in the University of Chicago—a transition from the familiar world (his interior landscape, akam) to the unfamiliar country (the world outside his self, the puram). The article shall focus on Journeys: A Poet’s Diary and A.K. Ramanujan’s unpublished diary to explore his observations and experiences of life in the US. These reveal the way in which his inner self met the new space he entered, followed by his expressing, through his creative and critical self, the interface and intermingling of the two. These travel writings go beyond mere records of observations—they are cultural artifacts left behind by a truly transnational traveler — as a man from a South-Indian milieu; who had been exposed to the British system of education; who was exceptionally intelligent, a poet and critic; and, a keen observer. Theories which engage with the akam-puram paradigm, environment (Buel), culture in a liquid modern world (Bauman) and cosmopolitanism (Appiah) shall be used as tools to analyse and assess the select texts.

El amazonas de tres viajeros cartógrafos: entre la experiencia y la imaginación geográfica [The Amazon of Three Cartographer-Travelers: Between Experience and Geographic Imagination]

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Desde la primera mitad del siglo XVI el río Amazonas empezó a ser representado cartográficamente, en principio por el avistamiento de sus bocas y posteriormente por los recorridos que se emprendieron. El primero de estos supuso su azaroso descubrimiento en 1542 por una expedición española que partió de Quito y llegó hasta el Atlántico. Un siglo más tarde, los portugueses invirtieron el sentido y remontaron el gran río desde la desembocadura hasta los Andes. Estos recorridos estuvieron acompañados por cronistas cuyas informaciones y registros sirvieron como fuente de inspiración para las descripciones europeas del Nuevo Mundo. Se pretende entonces mostrar la evolución de los imaginarios y las representaciones de la Amazonia desde la experiencia de tres viajeros que atravesaron el océano entre los siglos XVI y XVII, pero además fueron cartógrafos que legaron mapas recurrentes en atlas, compendios y trabajos historiográficos sobre la región que probablemente más haya despertado la curiosidad y también la imaginación en América. Desde el bosquejo de una desembocadura en el Atlántico hasta una vista aérea del curso del río, pasando por una figura serpenteante, se presentan tres representaciones cartográficas del Amazonas como productos de la experiencia de viaje, que evidencia diferentes formas de acercarse y percibir la realidad, junto con la imaginación geográfica, mezcla de ideas fantásticas, ideales y míticas con saberes prácticos en relación con el reconocimiento del territorio.

[Since the first half of the 16th century, the Amazon River began to be cartographically represented, initially through the sighting of its mouths and later by expeditions undertaken along its course. The first of these marked its perilous discovery in 1542 by a Spanish expedition that set out from Quito and reached the Atlantic. A century later, the Portuguese reversed the route, ascending the great river from its mouth to the Andes. These journeys were accompanied by chroniclers whose information and records served as sources of inspiration for European descriptions of the New World. This study aims to illustrate the evolution of imaginaries and representations of the Amazon from the experiences of three travelers who crossed the ocean between the 16th and 17th centuries. These individuals were also cartographers who contributed maps frequently included in atlases, compendiums, and historiographical works on the region, which likely sparked the most curiosity and also the imagination in America. From the sketch of a mouth at the Atlantic to an aerial view of the river's course, through a serpentine figure, three cartographic representations of the Amazon are presented as products of the travel experience. These depictions reveal different ways of approaching and perceiving reality, along with geographical imagination, a blend of fantastic, ideal, and mythical ideas with practical knowledge related to the recognition of the territory.]

Travel and the Self in Maggie Shipstead's The Great Circle

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This article presents travel as the nexus between the two protagonists of Maggie Shipstead’s The Great Circle (2021): aviator Marian Graves, whose passion for flight and physical travels double as, and intensify, an inner journey of self-discovery, and Hadley Baxter, a contemporary Hollywood actress who interprets Marian in a biopic and, through this experience, identifies with her, expanding her consciousness and constructing herself as woman. Marian and Hadley have similar, tragic family histories and, despite living a century apart, are both subject to the violence and constraints of a patriarchal society that deprives women of agency and condemns the transgression of gender roles. Consequently, the novel deploys multiple forms of travel and travel writing to ask what it means to be a woman in the United States and explore the contribution of physical and metaphorical journey to the discovery of the self, other people and the world. While close in scope to canonical male travel narratives, I argue that The Great Circle juxtaposes different stories (Marian’s logbook, a novel and a biography based on it, and Hadley’s movie) and, therefore, different accounts of Marian’s life, to raise questions about the very possibility of knowing anything or anybody. The novel simultaneously denounces women’s objectification by presenting both Marian and Hadley as public figures constructed by others: Marian’s logbook is fictionalised and published without her consent, while Hadley exists only in the characters that she plays and the image that the tabloids project of her. Shipstead’s ambiguous use of the symbolism of the circle further complicates the novel’s epistemological inquiry by betraying expectations about continuity and closure. All circles and journeys in the novel remain open-ended and merge with one another, connecting people and experiences across space and time.

From Superhighway to Hyperreality: The Infrastructure of "Astral America"

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During a series of road-trips undertaken in the 1970s and 1980s, the French theorist Jean Baudrillard encountered an American West that had become a laboratory of hyperreality. In his observations about “Astral America,” Baudrillard claims the perspective of an outside observer, but he exhibits a fascination for the space of the road that is characteristically American, if not at-times stereotypically so, begging the question: what is the link between postmodern theory and automobile infrastructure? This article uses Cotten Seiler’s concept of the “apparatus of automobility” (2008) to interrogate the material and discursive relations between Baudrillard’s Amérique (1986; trans. 1988) and the period in the history of American automobility in which it emerges. Just as the Interstate Highway was solidifying the private car’s supremacy, the OPEC oil embargo brought the petroleum-powered, auto-mobile ideal of the good life into crisis, opening intellectual inroads for thinking the U.S.’s hyperreal self-production while aboard the nation’s superhighways. Baudrillard's classic work of travelogue-theory invites an infrastructural account of the postmodern moment that would situate concepts from French theory and their uptake in the American academy within a context of transnationally mediated transport infrastructures.

Decolonial Animal Ethics in Linda Hogan’s Poetry and Prose. Towards Interspecies Thriving by Małgorzata Poks (Book Review)

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Małgorzata Pok’s Decolonial Animal Ethics in Linda Hogan’s Poetry and Prose: Towards Interspecies Thriving (2023) focuses on the relationship between the modern, hierarchical, anthropocentric view of non-human animals, and the traditional, relational view in Indigenous ontologies. In dialogue with human-animal studies, decolonial studies, and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), the study provides an in-depth engagement with the literary authorship of Chickasaw poet and novelist Linda Hogan. The questions that Poks asks are: What is the significance of Indigenous knowledges for the Anthropocene? How do these knowledges relate to the extinction of species and environmental grief? What insights are offered by Indigenous ethics to activists and decision makers in this regard? Despite the scope of Hogan’s production there is not much written about her literary production, Poks claims, even less so about the representation of the human-animal relationship in it. This is a lack which Poks makes up for in a thorough investigation of Hogan’s prose and poetry from the 1970’s until today. In Hogan’s works, themes like mercy, compassion, wildness, grief, and the connection between femininity and animality are in constant dialogue with the painful story of Indigenous America. Through Hogan’s own experiences in life, her description of places like Oklahoma and Colorado gain both material and metaphorical qualities. This is also the case with the landscapes and the non-human animals who inhabit them and who become agents in their own right in a constant yet shifting and transformative relationship to the human, who is thus decentered in effective ways.

The Beats in Mexico by David Stephen Calonne (A Book Review)

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The Beats in Mexico (2022) by David Stephen Calonne is reviewed here in terms of its contribution to the larger body of academic studies that explore the representation of Mexico in US literature. Calonne's study distinguishes itself by emphasizing the importance of overlooked female writers among the Beat generation, including Bonnie Bremser, Joanne Kyger, and Margaret Randall, who appear alongside more familiar names such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. In doing so, Calonne expands the discussion of the Beats in important ways and, furthermore, offers a welcome contribution that enriches the conversation around the understanding (and misunderstanding) of Mexico by US writers and intellectuals. Given the continued tensions between the two countries, it should be of great topical interest as well.

RIAS Editorial Policy / Stylesheet

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The Editorial Policy and Stylesheet of the Review of International American Studies - information for potential Contributors.