Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Post Contemporary Interventions)

Rating:
Summary: Travel and Its Metaphors
Review: Following the path set by James Clifford, who long ago proposed a much-needed bridge between anthropological, literary and historical approaches to the topic of travel culture, Kaplan analyzes the various metaphoric uses of travel in feminist and poststructuralist criticisms. Displacement, diaspora, borders, exile, migration, nomadism, homelessness, tourism and so on: Kaplan aims to investigate the role played by these symbols and metaphors in contemporary literary and cultural theory in Europe and the United States, linking them to the history of production of colonial discourses. Her main argument is that these metaphors of travel contribute to the blurring of fundamental differences and disputes between national identities, classes, races and genders. In each chapter, a particular binary formation (e.g., exile/tourism) or charged metaphor (e.g., nomad) is examined in order to highlight the possibilities and limitations of these terms as they appear in Euro-American theory. "Without rejecting or dismissing the powerful testimony of personal and individual experiences of displacement", she asks, "how is it possible to avoid ahistorical universalization and the mystification of social relations that Euro-American discourses of displacements often deploy?" (p. 2-3). In other words, it is necessary to investigate which material forces allow a social and collective phenomenon such as the modern experience of mass-movement, voluntary or forced, to be so often represented as an individualized experience. But Kaplan, as she herself acknowledges, is more concerned with the movement of ideas and practices rather than with movements of bodies through specific places. The lack of empirical references, I suspect, many times leads her to be imprisoned by the same rhetorical conventions she proposes to criticize.

Rating:
Summary: The decline of the western thought
Review: I frankly nothing learned from this feminist postmodernist approach of displacements and travels. If you want my opinion as a social anthropologist all this postmodern buhaha combining feminist studies, postcolonialism and post structuralism ( baptised as cultural studies) mark the decline or the impossibility of our western culture to approach the Otherness or the Difference. Culturalists such as Carmen Kaplan who seldom move from their safe arm-chair are harming ethnological studies much more than Frazer did a century ago from his Victorian arm-chair in Oxford. If Frazer had as an excuse his classisist background I should like to ask Ms Kaplan what her background could be. Something of all and nothing at all. I bet that she does not even conceive the etymology of her name. Academia and the layman are not greatly beneficiated by this sort of pseudo social science books. I admit loosing four hours of my life trying to collect a valuable information from this book but I did not succeed. In conclusion : PURE TRUSH. Why on earth uneducated western people who never dared to visit remoted populations practicing original popular culture, write this sort of books addressed to a western public if they cannot communicate even for un hour with original patterns of culture. The symptom of this alienation is not hazardous : The most one is baptised in our western culture the less one can see "beyond the lines" of the different cultures. Tomorrow I will burn this trash in my fireplace !

Rating:
Summary: No comments
Review: Really a huge mistake by buying this book... Just a miscellaneous of several authors, and some of them, she just really doesn't know at all... really desappointed... mutiples attacks but no arguments.

The question that remains:
What is the matter with Cultural Studies?