Call No. 6
Metamorphosis of Travel

Issue No. 6 of the Journal aims to explore and highlight the different dimensions of travel by considering its multiple meanings and nuances in various contexts and non-equivalent experiences, such as inner experience, encounter, pilgrimage, exile, diaspora, uprooting, tourism, and migration. Travel can be related to choice and the realm of pleasure on one side, and, on the other, to the suffering and pain of the migrant when the experience is endured.

Let us begin with the most radiant sense of travel, that of voluntary action, an experience of self-renewal and transformation, but also an elective condition for practicing an ethics of encounter. Eric J. Leed (1992) has captured the transformations of social existence in travel, where he introduces an ancient reflection, based on the assumption that there is no "I" without an "other," and that identity is formed through a process made of reflections, mirrors, and reciprocal recognition. Whether in the case of real or imaginary journeys, the encounter with the other can occur in the inner realm, crossing the shadow line, those barriers erected to guard repressed memories or hidden emotions and desires. Beyond the encounter with otherness, the semantic area involving the sphere of travel also concerns borders and frontiers, and with them, the act of crossing or transgressing them. When talking about "borders," we refer to frontiers as historical and political entities, "places where the dialectic and confrontation with the foreigner and communication between civilizations are periodically re-negotiated" (Balibar, 2004).

Continuing with this radiant dimension of travel, the invitation by James Clifford to "rethink cultures as sites of residence and travel" (Clifford, 1999: 45) could be stimulating, through practices of crossing, tactics of translation, and multiple experiences of belonging. We should not forget the need for stability felt by the exile; in his Strade, Clifford reflects on the concepts of roads and roots as metaphors of two existential modalities that should not be opposed hierarchically but related, blurring the boundaries that divide them through two phrases that invite the subversion of binary oppositions: "to travel-in-residence" and "to reside-in-travel" (Clifford, 1999: 50-51). Expanding the discourse, he suggests looking at the concepts of culture, tradition, and identity in terms of travel relations, while practicing non-absolutist forms of citizenship by establishing connections with multiple places (Clifford, 1999: 18).

Travel is also an inner experience, the back-and-forth between memory and imagination, as well as documentary or fictional writing, the account of an experience carried out on land or at sea, or an imaginary journey in the spaces of the cosmos. These experiences take the form of descriptive texts in geography, history, and anthropology, while also spreading realistic autobiographical narratives, imaginary or allegorical journeys, and travel accounts of discovery. Moving further along, the dimension of travel becomes an educational experience, intertwined with the landscape and its aesthetic contemplation (Di Profio, 2018), but also with the other great topic, the encounter with the other and the elsewhere. In the "emerging literature" (Taddeo, 2023), from the literature of emigration to literary nomadism (De Lucia, 2017: 1-187), we often witness a mutation of travel that presents itself as an epiphany of the spirit in crossing mental and geographical boundaries, cultures, and languages.

It is true that at its origins, travel is presented as a description of an experience that was initially a male prerogative (Frediani, 2012: 99-109); however, in recent years, several studies have focused on women’s travel narratives, highlighting their differences, such as the question of self in contact with diversity, experienced and narrated as a test and strengthening of identity by male travelers, and as deconstruction and self-search by female travelers (Monticelli, 2000: 116; Ulivieri-Pace, 2012; Perosino, 2012: 5-76). Here, geographical travel intertwines with the history and colonial past, transfigured in equally problematic and political ways in the forms of postcolonial rewriting, counter-history, or neo-historical novels (Chambers-Curti, 1996; Piga Bruni, 2018: 54).

Travel, as an adventure, as a departure from the universe, cannot fail to evoke tourism. Throughout history, the image of a distant world has been recurrent in geographical and travel literature, serving to define the other by opposition to "us," either to identify a utopian world to contrast with the corruption of the original environment, or to identify the different in order to justify existing structures and power relations within society. The etymology of the term "tourism" carries the idea of circular movement. A tour is not just displacement, but a journey with stages and a return to the starting point (Leiper, 1983). Tourism involves the temporary movement of humans, distinct from simple travel or permanent relocation. Today, the global "travel and tourism" industry encompasses all activities and services related to the temporary transfer of people from their usual residence to other locations, for reasons such as leisure, culture, healthcare, sports, and more (Hall et al., 2015). Despite the dry technical-economic definition, travel retains a metaphorical meaning in many dimensions, including the extreme case that refers to death as the last journey of the body. Travel always implies the risk and anxiety of death, but it also points to the path toward health, wealth, and wisdom. The triple definition of profits that can be gained—material, intellectual, or commercial—thus triangulates the object as a zone of potential loss or profit (Van Den Abbeele, 1991).

From the perspective of losses, excessive tourism carries the risk of death for the destinations where the meeting between residents and tourists becomes a wicked alliance between bad agents, where governing it requires a virtuous alliance between ethics and an economy oriented toward the geographical sustainability of tourist spaces.

Finally, travel is also exile, uprooting, where individuals move due to strong existential, political, and economic pressures. In this sense, travel is a choice determined by the material conditions of existence, linked to necessity, exile, and escape, the result of external reasons beyond the will of the traveling subject. Eric J. Leed (1992: 324) underlines this when he observes that the benefits and transformations of travel stem from a loss. Alongside this, other processes that mark the experience are separation and distancing, which can be evaluated negatively or positively but relate to an experience where the enrichment and transformation of the self are preceded by a phase of purification and liberation of the traveler. The cultural uprooting inherent in departure is at the root of the sense of detachment and alienation that can be experienced during transit, where the traveler observes relationships, languages, customs, and practices from an external, moving position (Leed, 1992: 325).

Faced with those undergoing forced migration, the transcultural operator of care and education in the new millennium must be willing to undertake journeys through the other, to ferry mental and geographical places, and to transit people and suffering (Ancora, 2017: 188-196). A "passeur," capable of crossing both external and internal borders, ready to trespass into that "beyond," where new acquisitions of knowledge and relationships are possible. Between perceptions, narratives, and singular biographies, and collective reconstructions and experiences, where awareness and memories become new common platforms of deconstruction and self-search, as well as a relational "we" to linger in and inhabit with renewed reciprocity (Glissant, 1990).

To speak of a real or metaphorical dimension, between odyssey and epiphany, of travel, is to grasp the anthropological, pedagogical, ethnographic, geographical, historical, literary, and psychological value of crossings between sciences that the Journal encourages. In particular, the Journal welcomes contributions that explore the following lines of research:

- Practices of welcoming care that foster a "biographical space" where one can tell and recount oneself at the end of a journey, especially when it has been endured.

- Travel as an educational metaphor: an analysis of how travel can represent a path of personal and professional growth from birth (lifelong learning).

- Pedagogical practices related to travel: educational experiences that incorporate physical or metaphorical travel as a teaching method.

- Travel in gendered narrative practices.

- Travel as an occasion for formation in the tradition of the Bildungsroman.

- Travel as an encounter with the other and the elsewhere, acquiring other ways of seeing, renewing one’s perspective, and opening up to other ways of thinking and being in the world.

- Travel as an experience of disorientation and departure from the familiar universe, leading to a confrontation with otherness and the redefinition of one’s identity.

- Travel and tourism as social phenomena.

- Linguistic phenomena of particular interest in migratory and nomadic literature: loans, contaminations, interferences, creolization, with educational implications for training.

 

Bibliography: 

Ancora A., Verso una cultura dell’incontro, studi per una terapia transculturale, FrancoAngeli, Milano, 2017.

Balibar E., Noi, cittadini d’Europa? Le frontiere, lo stato, il popolo. tr. it. Manifestolibri, Roma, 2004.

Ceserani R., Io, l’altro e lo straniero, in P. Boitani e M. Fusillo (a cura di), Letteratura Europea, Grandi temi. Torino, UTET, 2014, vol. III.

Chambers I., Curti, L. (eds.), The Post-colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, Londo, Routledge; tr. it. La questione postcoloniale: cieli comuni, orizzonti divisi, Liguori Napoli, 1996.

Clifford J., Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Harvard University Press, 1997: tr. it. Strade. Viaggio e traduzione alla fine del Secolo Ventesimo, Bollati Boringhieri, Milano, 1999.

Curti L., La voce dell'altra. Scritture ibride tra femminismo e postcoloniale, Meltemi, Milano, 2018, pp. 10-236.

De Lucia S., (a cura di), Scrittrici Nomadi. Passare i confini tra lingue e culture. Sapienza Editrice Universitaria, Roma, 2017.

Di Profio L., Il viaggio di formazione: fra l’estetica dei paesaggi e l’estetica del sé. Mimesis, Milano, 2018.

Frediani F., Raccontare il viaggio. Prospettive di genere, in L. Marfè, Sulle strade del viaggio. Nuovi orizzonti tra letteratura e antropologia, Mimesis Milano 2012, pp. 99-109.

Glissant, E., Poetica della relazione, Gallimard, Parigi, 1990.

Hall C. M., Gössling S., Scott, D. (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of tourism and sustainability, Routledge, Abingdon, 2015.

Leed, Eric J., The Mond of the Traveler. From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism, Basic Books, New Yorik, 1991; tr. it. La mente del viaggiatore: dall’Odissea al turismo globale, tr. it. E. Joy Mannucci, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1992.

Leiper N., An etymology of “tourism”. In «Annals of tourism research» 10(2), 277-280, 1983.

Monticelli R., Lo stupore della differenza: Anna Jameson e la tradizione del racconto di viaggio, Pàtron, Bologna, 2000.

Piga Bruni E., La lotta e il negativo. Sul romanzo storico contemporaneo, Mimesis, Milano, 2018.

Perosino M., Io viaggio da sola Einaudi, Torino, 2012.

Taddeo R., Letteratura nascente, 2023, open access.

Ulivieri S., Pace R., Il viaggio al femminile come itinerario di formazione identitaria, FrancoAngeli, Milano, 2012.

Van Den Abbeele G., Travel as metaphor: from Montaigne to Rousseau. University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota, 1991.

Note to Authors / Co-Authors

The deadline for the delivery of the article is set for October 19, 2025.

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