The Voyager in Question: Histories of Travel, 1930-2010

This dissertation is situated within a field of cultural studies that seeks to develop a broader understanding of the political stakes of twentieth- and twenty-first century debates over who can travel. This line of inquiry responds to the persistent tendency in travel writing over the course of the century to exclude certain subjects in movement from the role of the traveler. The question, "What is travel?" is often treated in both literary texts and criticism as a philosophical or abstract question, stripped of its historical and political implications. I ask, what is the relationship between this effort to restrict the identity of the traveler and France's imperialist history? How and why are non-European subjects denied the status of traveler, and how does the debate over the traveler / tourist binary, which has received more critical attention, relate to the reification of colonial and postcolonial subjects in the role of the "sedentary native"? Taking these questions as a point of departure, this dissertation explores how the theoretical opposition between the dynamic traveler and the passive travelee is constructed, undermined, and directly challenged in texts belonging to a wide variety of genres, from the historical novel to the Oulipian literary exercise to autofiction./nThe first part of the dissertation considers representations of travel at the "apogee" of the French Empire in the early 1930s. In Chapter One, I analyze how the 1931 Colonial Exposition, in framing a visit to the fair as a voyage around the world, both reifies the identity of the European visitor to the fair (indigenous to the metropole) as a traveler and reinforces the notion that the colonial subjects imported to perform the role of the "natives" at the fair (many of whom had traveled thousands of miles to reach Paris) could never occupy the role of the traveler. Chapter Two moves across genres to André Malraux's adventure novel La voie royale (1930). I show how this modernist text--while continuing to exclude colonial subjects from the role of the traveler--nevertheless challenges the association of Europeans with dynamism and progress so central to the rhetoric of the mission civilisatrice./nThe second part of the dissertation analyzes texts from the last quarter of the century that reconfigure ideas of travel. In Chapter Three, I demonstrate how Maryse Condé's two-volume historical novel Ségou (1984-85) challenges the myth of African ahistoricity that emerges from both colonial historiographies and certain Negritude discourses through its narration of histories of travel in West Africa and throughout the Diaspora. In contrast to the representation of West African cultural spaces at the Exposition through an essentialized, monolithic architecture, the figure of the city in Ségou is a site of cultural exchange and hybridity./nChapter Four turns to two works published during the mid-1970s: a watershed moment for the history of tourism and immigration in the twentieth century. I juxtapose Georges Perec's Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien (1975)--an account of several days spent sitting in the Place Saint-Sulpice--with Rachid Boudjedra's Topographie idéale pour une agression caractérisée (1975), which narrates an unnamed emigrant's struggle to navigate the subterranean labyrinth of the Paris metro. I explore how Perec's encounters with tourists circulating through the Place Saint-Sulpice can shed light on the ways in which native Parisians respond to the presence of Boudjedra's protagonist in the metropolitan capital. In both texts, interactions between Parisians and travelers to Paris are shaped by the natives' anxiety over the perceived globalization of mobility in the 1970s./nIn Chapter Five, I examine a pair of texts representing urban itineraries in the French capital at the turn of the century: Bessora's 53 cm (1999) and Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder (1999). By reimagining Paris as a site of travel, the location of multiple histories and cultures, the texts read in this last chapter fundamentally undermine the oppositions between "here" and "elsewhere," home and abroad, traveler and native, and more broadly speaking, between travel and dwelling, which have defined colonial and neocolonial ideas of travel throughout the twentieth century. Finally, in the Afterword, I suggest how an approach to travel literature structured around close attention to historical context can inform contemporary debates over the disciplinary boundaries of French / Francophone Studies.

Advisor: Guerlac, Suzanne
Britto, Karl A.