Political Tourism and its Texts / / Maureen Moynagh.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter University of Toronto Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Moynagh, Maureen ,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2016]; ©2008
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (288 p.)

The concept of political tourism is new to cultural and postcolonial studies. Nonetheless, it is a concept with major implications for scholarship. Political Tourism and Its Texts looks at the writings of political tourists, travellers who seek solidarity with international political struggles. With reference to the travel writing of, among others, Nancy Cunard, W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, Ernesto Che Guevara, and Salman Rushdie, Maureen Moynagh demonstrates the ways in which political tourism can be a means of exploring the formation of transnational affiliations and commitments.Moynagh's aims are threefold. First, she looks at how these tourists create a sense of belonging to political struggles not their own and express their personal and political solidarity, despite the complexity of such cross-cultural relationships. Second, Moynagh analyses how these authors position their readers in relation to political movements, inviting a sense of responsibility for the struggles for social justice. Finally, the author situates key twentieth-century imperial struggles in relation to contemporary postcolonial and cultural studies theories of 'new' cosmopolitanism.Drawing on sociological, postcolonial, poststructuralist, and feminist theories, Political Tourism and Its Texts is at once an insightful study of modern writers and the causes that inspired them, and a call to address, with political urgency, contemporary neo-imperialism and the politics of global inequality.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Political Tourism and its Texts -- 1. Cunard's Lines: Political Touring and the Making of the Negro Anthology -- 2. Revolutionary Drag in Auden and Isherwood's Journey to a War -- 3. 'Speaking Bitterness': Agnes Smedley in China -- 4. 'Following in the Footsteps of Che': Political Tourism as a Strategy for Entering and Leaving Modernity -- 5. The Postcolonial Migrant as Political Tourist: Salman Rushdie's The Jaguar Smile -- 6. Political Tourism as Transnational Feminist Practice: Margaret Randall, Rebecca Gordon, and Adrienne Rich -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Illustration Credits -- Index