When the Subaltern Travels

Travel carries wide implications in contemporary culture. In the field of cultural studies and, more generally, in the humanities, travel has become one of the predominant paradigms informing the political unconscious of current research. The concepts of border, deterritorialization, mapping, cartography, liminality, interlanguages, the intellectual-as-nomad, stand-point epistemology, hybridity, language-games theory, Otherness, pluritopical hermeneutics, and globalization, as part of an analytical repertoire that has come into prominence in the last two decades, attest to this ubiquity. The contemporary experience of heightened geographical mobility, the changing configuration of nation-states, the constant flux of ethnic, sexual, and gender identities, the rapid dissemination of information, and other phenomena associated with the globalization of late capitalism, present suggestive reasons as to why such notions have come to dominate current debates and scholarship. Under the garments of these analytical tools lurks travel as an all-powerful presence. Through its mediations we are to understand that new territories, communities, and paradigms are brought into focus, allowing for a cultural and historical negotiation of sorts: the nomad-intellectual would be the one to bring forth the tremendous difference of these spaces and practices allowing for a new understanding of this proliferation through the deployment of a critical apparatus that would seem to render this promiscuous materiality intelligible—in the process, I would suggest, textualizing the materiality of these practices, displacing the anthropological “body” of the nineteenth century by the “texts” of contemporary cultural studies, and replacing liberatory social practices with social exegesis.