Round tables > Thoughts on the idea of travel

Reflections on the idea of travel

 Wednesday, October 1st from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM

 Centre des Colloques, room 3.02

Organization : Enrique Fernández Domingo (LER, Université Paris 8), Cléa Fortuné (CREW, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle)

Speakers : Sergio Delgado (IMAGER, UPEC), Johanna Exenberger (LER, Université Paris Cité), Julio Zárate (LLSETI, Université Savoie Mont Blanc), Pascal Riviale (CNRS)

Abstract :

Over the past twenty years, the theme of travel has been approached from a variety of angles and disciplines. By way of example, we can think of a possible non-linear itinerary articulated from books such as Mary Louise Pratt's (1997) on the narratives of 19th-century European travelers and the consolidation of imperialism ; Beatriz Colombi (2004) on "the intellectual journey", as well as the countless works that highlight the importance of transatlantic relations and the circulation of knowledge, as in the case of Pura Fernández (2015) whose book "la Re(d)pública transatlántica de la Letras" places at the center the exchanges and displacements made by Latin American and Spanish women during the transition to the twentieth century or, finally, the cultural history works of Sylvain Venayre (2006).

This round table proposes a discussion of "travel", defined as the movement of a person through space without being subject to any physical or psychological constraints. By traveler, we mean an individual who covers a distance for a specific length of time, motivated by the goal of reaching a predefined, possible or sometimes unexpected destination, who experiences a change of scenery, who gives meaning to the journey itself and, finally, who undergoes an intellectual, emotional and physical experience that suspends his or her relationship with the world. This approach concerns travelers, their written and visual accounts, their life and sensory experiences, their practices, their representations, as well as the knowledge, territories and landscapes they cross and re-signify through their travels.

"Travel" is also considered as an object of study that cannot be reduced to the simple action of going or being transported from one place to another. On the contrary, we define it as a movement in space and time that can also be characterized by an encounter with strangeness or identification. The ruptures produced by departure suspend the ordinary world, or reshape it, and are linked to the intensity of immersion and the duration of the individual traveler's experience.

The "journey" is also an encounter with the knowledge, representations, bodies, sensibilities and fears that inhabit the traveler himself or herself, and the people and landscapes he or she encounters. In their diversity, these factors are decisive for the assimilation or rejection of the encounter and, above all, for the meanings and transformations that flow from it. The "journey" is seen as a conscious, organized and coherent set of cognitive, sensory, affective and evaluative elements, i.e., a temporal, spatial, social, gendered and culturally situated event that influences the perception of the person making the journey as well as the host environment or place.

To give an account of his or her journey, the traveler must use words or images to recount his or her experience. This action introduces a distance from the experience of the journey. Every journey thus involves a series of dislocation and translation operations, in which the individual who travels acts both as mediator and inventor of the new realities he or she reconstructs.