Travel Worlds: Journeys in Contemporary Cultural Politics

African-American musicians head East for Kung-Fu kicks while paedophiles go for cheap sex pilgrimage; Western bible-bashers adopt missionary positions in India while heroic Saint George signs on as an Arab soldier in Britain; the scars of Partition mock the protocols of transit, while nomadic insurgents resist the Bangladeshi nation state with lyrical persuasion; Kula Shaker and Madonna trinketize the ‘Orient’ while dead tourists exchange values with travelling ‘terrorists’; British Mirpuris and Black women travel back to the ‘Old Country’ and beyond in ways that are not quite as they seem; and ethnographers collide with tourists in the carousel of Goa’s resorts.

Including poetry and fiction alongside academic essays, this book refuses simplistic dichotomies of north/south and east/west and confronts head on existing conventions of writing about travel in post-colonial, literary and cultural studies. In so doing, it sheds new light on: the shortcomings of border theories and nation-state parameters; the politics of diasporic and transnational travels, the relations between tourism and terrorism, the limitations of ‘alternative’ tourism.