Re-sharing for the weekend crowd. The official link to our lovely #OpenAccess collection, 'Minoritised Languages and Travel' in the Modern Languages Open journal.
This is a collection of 5 essays + introduction that explore frictions between traveller and travelee as well as the inherent instability of social, cultural and language hierarchies.
At last, it's publication day for the 'Minoritised Languages and Travel' special collection in the Modern Languages Open journal edited with an intro by yours truly -- and all available Open Access.
Allow me to share each paper in this thread as they get published one by one.
First up,
“Everything Remains the Same”: Julio Camba Travelling Spain
by David Miranda-Barreiro
Abstract
In the first decades of the twentieth century, the Madrid-based Galician journalist Julio Camba (1882–1962) acquired long-lasting fame as a travel writer thanks to his foreign chronicles published in the Spanish press and subsequently compiled in a series of volumes. [...] Drawing on studies on state nationalism (Billig 1995) and Spanish nationalism (Taibo 2014, Delgado 2014) this article examines not only Camba’s own views but the response from contemporary scholarship to his texts.
Next up we have
Money Matters: Encounter and Economic Disparity in Irish-language Travel Narratives
by Eimear Kennedy
Abstract
[...] By looking at the travel writing of four Irish-language writers – Alex Hijmans, Manchán Magan, Gabriel Rosenstock and Cathal Ó Searcaigh – this article explores the encounters between Irish-language travel writers and foreign peoples and cultures. It investigates the attempts made by these writers to distance themselves from cultural, political and economic hegemony of Western powers but also highlights the often ambivalent positioning of Irish-language travel writers and demonstrates the barriers to encounter and the asymmetrical power structures that economic inequality can create.
The third article is
A “Devolved Minority”: Contemporary German and French Guidebook Perspectives of Wales
by Anna-Lou Dijkstra
Abstract
Guidebooks play an important role in increasing the visibility of a nation, as they introduce the country to potential visitors and create images prior to travelling. However, they also tend to reinforce stereotypes and create “romantic fictions” (Mahn 2008). This article examines the representation of Wales in French and German guidebooks and consequently elucidates the cultural and political recognition of Wales in these continental texts. The depiction of Wales as a distinct entity on an administrative, or rather on a cultural and linguistic level will be discussed, as well as the commonalities and differences between French and German views.
The fourth article is
“A language of wet stones and mists”: The Caribbean Poet as a Traveller in Wales and England
by Marija Bergam Pellicani
Abstract
This article examines Derek Walcott’s “travel poems” about Wales and England from the collections The Fortunate Traveller (1981) and Midsummer (1984) through the prism of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of littérature mineure. [...] In their engagement with the Welsh and English “Elsewhere” these poems ultimately participate in transvaluation of the relationship between centre and periphery, a dynamics that marked the most significant Anglophone literary currents in the second part of the twentieth century.
This leaves me with just my own #introduction to the whole special issue.
Abstract
This introduction to the MLO special issue “Minoritised Languages and Travel” provides an overview of the pieces in this collection in context with historical travel accounts in German about nineteenth-century Wales.
Happy reading, y'alls. (For convenience, I will later post the link to the complete bundle.)