Journeys in the Palimpsest: British women's travel to Greece,1840-1914

Discussions of British travel to Greece in the nineteenth century have been dominated by the work of Lord Byron. Byron’s contemporary Greeks were Orientalised, while antique Greece was personified as a captive Greek woman on the brink of compromise by the Ottomans, or a cadaver. Throughout the nineteenth century this antique vista was employed by the tourist industry. This thesis offers a consideration of the visions and vistas of Greece encountered by British women who travelled to Greece in the subsequent years, especially in the light of how commercial tourism limited or constructed their access to Greece. Commercial tourist structures were in place in Athens and other major sites of antiquity, but the majority of the women considered here travelled through a terrain that went beyond a narrow and museum staged experience of Greece. Three paradigms have been established for women travelling in Greece: the professional archaeologist, the ethnographer, and the tourist. The women archaeologist combated the patriarchal domination of the classics, not only to posit a female intellectual who could master Greece, but also reveal how antique Greece was used to underwrite patriarchal British ideologies. The ethnographers in Greece are a mixed collection of semi-professional and professional ethnographers, considered alongside more conventional travel narratives, all of which offer discussions of the modern Greek psyche trapped at a series of liminal fissures (East/West, antique/modern). Concentrating on women and geography, they subtly conflate the two to read nation in gender. However, without the sexualised aspect of their male counterparts, they read Greek women through a series of diverse practices that they identify through a close contact that could only be established between women. The modern tourist in Greece offers the most enduring and lasting type of traveller in Greece. Travelling with and against guidebooks, the discussion considers the visual technologies that helped to codify the way Greece is still seen as a tourist destination. In conjunction with this, the popular discourses denigrating women’s travel are also discussed, which offers a key reason for the dismissal of their literary output

The virtual tourist gaze in Greece, 1897–1905

While travelling in Greece in 1892, a British tourist wryly commented on a group of tourists arriving in Athens who were travelling with nothing but a Baedeker guidebook and a pair of opera glasses (Armstrong, 1893). By 1892 tourist images were beginning to determine the benchmark for authentic vistas of Greece. This argument analyses an early technology for generating three dimensional images of Greece and the technological, ideological and discursive features that distinguish a particular iteration of the early tourist gaze. The study seeks to bring research from the humanities on tourism in Greece to a broader audience as a means of investigating the potential for more productive cross-flows in research covering tourism and the arts and humanities

Travel writing and sexuality : queering the genre

Sex and travel are hardly unfamiliar bedfellows; indeed, access to sex, especially when it is tabooed, has often been an impetus to travel in the first place. Yet if a significant body of research has been produced around gender and travel writing, especially on women’s writing, sexuality has seldom been an important criterion in the scholarly analysis of travel writing past and present. Apart from a few notable exceptions (Littlewood 2001; Phillips 2002; Jacobs 2012), the analysis of sexuality has usually been subsumed into discussions of gender, whilst ‘queer’ in travel writing studies is often used simply as a shorthand for gay and lesbian identities rather than as a methodological tool through which to approach the description of transgressive, alternative, or non-normative sexualities. Yet the burgeoning field of queer theory has the potential not only to create new inroads into well-known subjects, but also to contribute to an ongoing discussion of how bodies, identities and subjects are rendered and represented in the act of writing. In this chapter, accordingly, I explore some of the ways in which queer studies might productively intersect with travel writing studies. Rather than offering a comprehensive account or genealogy of queer travel writing, my aim is to highlight some key texts and moments where queer lives become more visible in travel writin

Relighting the fire : visualizing the lesbian in contemporary India

This article revisits the controversy surrounding Deepa Mehta's Fire (1996), India's first publicly released film depicting female same-sex desire. The film has become a touchstone for discussions of the representation of queer and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) lives in India. While the majority of critical accounts of the film have rejected the use of “lesbian” on the basis of its Anglo-American specificity, this article seeks to recast lesbians at the heart of Fire by filtering them through the lens of transnational protest, and by offering a close reading of the film's own play on religious and cultural symbolism. Viewed almost two decades after its release, in the light of the Delhi rape case of December 2012 and subsequent events, including the upholding of a law criminalizing gay sex in November 2013, the film now more than ever seems to offer a fantasy of the future, rather than a viable reality in the present day. Within Fire, the circumnavigation of heteronormative power and desire is certainly queer, but the film's labeling as “lesbian” subsequent to its release in India opened up an important public forum for a debate about female desire and independence that continues to resonate today. This article does not attempt to offer a conclusive argument about the use of the term “lesbian” to label the relationship between women that is depicted within the film, but it does examine the way in which the film itself visualizes desire between women, and in particular the use of Hindu narratives, imagery and motifs. The film's interpellation into lesbian politics is facilitated by the strong emphasis on a female-centered desire that is not defined by motherhood, that cannot be contained, and that demands to be seen

Literary folk : writing popular culture in colonial Punjab 1885-1905

This chapter identifies some of the ways a Punjabi literary sphere was (mis)understood in the late-Victorian empire through the curation of a canon of Punjabi folk-culture by R.C. Temple (1850-1931), Flora Annie Steel (1847-1929) and C.F. Usborne (1874-1919), all of whom lived and worked in Punjab as an extension of colonial administration. Examples of a diverse and rich Punjabi literary cultures were translated into English under the banner of ‘folklore’ which delegitimised the diversity of prose and verse in Punjabi with origins in religious, spiritual and genres of the epic derived from Persian

Queering postcolonial travel writing

Beginning with contemporary calls to decolonise travel writing, this article considers the intersection of race and sexuality in the genre. Why is the analysis of postcolonial travel writing so straight? Why is the analysis of queer travel writing so white? By answering these questions simultaneously, the article argues for the creation of a space from which we can understand how single-issue approaches to identity politics fail to take account of structural forms of homophobia and racism. Acknowledging their structural manifestations through the history of colonialism should advance an understanding of how and why some of the most historically queer-inclusive and diverse places in the world have come to be represented as the most hostile to queers in travel writing

Between visibility and elsewhere : South Asian queer creative cultures and resistance

This article draws on existing interviews and creative material from LGBTQ + South Asians who have lived and spent significant time in the UK as part of the Cross Border Queers project. It begins by considering creative forms of diasporic activism and creativity in the UK that have emerged from South Asian LGBTQ + communities and individuals. We discuss the ways in which South Asian LGBTQ + diasporic organising was formed through a sense of shared racial and class solidarity and especially under the umbrella of political Blackness. We then move on to the role played by cultural activism to see how artists have used culture as a way to advance social change and increase the visibility of South Asian LGBTQ + communities in the UK. We place different genres of visual culture, curation, performance and oral history to evoke how South Asian queer migrants articulate a distinct form of subjectivity and aesthetic practice

Between visibility and elsewhere: South Asian queer creative cultures and resistance

This article draws on existing interviews and creative material from LGBTQ + South Asians who have lived and spent significant time in the UK as part of the Cross Border Queers project. It begins by considering creative forms of diasporic activism and creativity in the UK that have emerged from South Asian LGBTQ + communities and individuals. We discuss the ways in which South Asian LGBTQ + diasporic organising was formed through a sense of shared racial and class solidarity and especially under the umbrella of political Blackness. We then move on to the role played by cultural activism to see how artists have used culture as a way to advance social change and increase the visibility of South Asian LGBTQ + communities in the UK. We place different genres of visual culture, curation, performance and oral history to evoke how South Asian queer migrants articulate a distinct form of subjectivity and aesthetic practice

Inclusive Volunteering in Scotland

With the support of the Scottish Government, and as part of Scotland’s Volunteering Action Plan, a project was developed by Make Your Mark and the University of Strathclyde to support inclusive volunteering programmes across Scotland’s voluntary sector. The project had two elements: >Gathering evidence on barriers to cultures of inclusive volunteering in volunteer organisations and community-led groups with lived experience of marginalisation (delivered through focus groups and a survey). >Designing an Inclusive Volunteering Toolkit. The project commenced in October 2022 with the first development programme workshop, and came to a close in July 2023 with the launch of the Inclusive Volunteering Toolkit. This report offers a summary of key findings and recommendations from the project

Sites for commemoration : trauma, memory and practice of reconciliation

This paper proceeds from a concern for how memories continue to be both allowed for and erased within and in relation to experiences of trauma and exclusion. We focus on two quite distinctive sites for memory-making, to allow for productive comparison: firstly, memorial locations located along and across the Indo-Pakistan border, with reference to the "larger Punjab" (in cultural, religious, and linguistic terms) that is so easily erased from the memorial landscape in adherence to national and nationalizing boundaries; and secondly, experiences of trauma within and in relation to Canadian nationbuilding, which includes both experiences of trauma for those excluded from the national imaginary (such as the indigenous people of Canada, and other racialized and marginalized communities) and the experiences of trauma that have brought so many to Canada in search of refuge. The paper is centred on practice, as well as theory, and is constructed around two projects that aim to foster reconciliation through and within memory work: (1) a recent project conducted at a tourist site in Sirhind, Punjab to think about how the historical lives of monuments are censored and erased, and a related ongoing project to foster memories of pre-partition shared cultural traditions in post-partition Indian Punjab in light of the 70th anniversary of Partition, and (2) a project entitled "Trauma, Memory and the Story of Canada," a series of art exhibitions, interpretation events, and theatrical production that explores the "difficult stories" that comprise the story of Canada at the 150th commemoration of the Confederation of Canada; this latter project has been funded through a major grant from the Canada 150 Fund from Canadian Heritage and was conceptualized by the South Asian Canadian Histories Association (SACHA), a collective of artists, arts professionals, and scholars who seek to integrate historical research and the arts in public-facing projects. These parallel anniversaries--of the founding of India and Canada--allow us an opportunity to consider what is at stake in commemorations, and what conditions of possibility can allow for reconciliation in relation to our troubled pasts