Travel Worlds : Journeys in Contemporary Cultural Politics Paperback

Tackling the dearth of politically-engaged work on travel and tourism, this book aims to provide a counter-narrative of travel-worlds shaped by the divergent legacies of colonialism, crusades, migration, diaspora, displacement, tourism, ethnography, political insurgency and transnationalization.

Issues addressed in the book include: north-south traffic in hip hop, kung-fu and sex tourism; missionaries in India; academics in the west; St George as an Arab soldier in the crusades; the Indian-Pakistan border, displacement and defiance; mobile resistance to nation-state hegemonies in Bangladesh; the international market value of dead tourists; pop personalities, MTV and souvenir culture; diasporized Mirpuri youth on travel; touring black women, pleasure islands; and ethnographers abroad.

The contributors refuse simplistic dichotomies of north/south and east/west, and confront head on existing conventions of writing about travel in post-colonial, literary and cultural studies.