Travel and Travel Writing: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean

Catalog description

How did people travel in a world without passports and borders? As difficult as it might be to imagine this possibility in today’s world, in this course we reconstruct the human experience of travel, and its literary expression, in a world unbound by nation-states. Through journeys in two inter-connected maritime arenas, this course examines travel-writing as a literary genre that crystallized between 1400 to 1900. The emphasis is on travelers who crossed conventional or older cultural boundaries, thereby forging a new sense of the world. Each week, we investigate concepts such as curiosity, translation, acculturation, disambiguation, cultural encounters, and boundaries. The materials treated include translations of Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Persian, Urdu, and Malay texts to and from the Islamic world (with a specific focus on circulation between the Middle East, South Asia, East Africa, and Southeast Asia) alongside accounts of European (Portuguese, Dutch, Italian, and French) travelers to the Indian Ocean. In this interdisciplinary seminar, students examine the conventions, topoi, and modes of narration in travel accounts while locating early modern texts and their authors within their historical contexts. Students will produce one research paper on a travel account in any language of their choice. The writing process is divided into several stages and students will collectively curate, revise, and workshop paper drafts in class over the course of the semester. Readings may include the Baburnama, Matteo Ricci’s The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, al-Hajari’s The Book of the Protector of Religion against the Unbelievers, Shaikh I‘tisamuddin’s The Wonders of Vilayet, Alam & Subrahmanyam’s Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes, and Stuart Schwartz’s Implicit Understandings.