Travel Writing: Encounters within and through Irish and Latin American spaces

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Deadline for articles: September 30th, 2014
Contributions are now invited for the 2014/15 Special Issue of the Journal of Irish Migration Studies in Latin America, an international, refereed online journal, edited by Sinéad Wall and Laura Izarra.
Ireland and Latin America share experiences of colonisation which were to some extent aided by travel accounts from the early 1600s through to the 1900s, many of which were concerned with either military fortifications or commercial matters. Just as the ‘New World’ had become a zone to be exploited for its natural wealth, by the mid nineteenth century travel writing about Ireland had become a means of expressing British anxiety about the island. After the famine period of 1845 to 1852 Ireland became a place to be exploited by potential property investors as well as by writers hoping to make money out of the sometimes harrowing descriptions of poverty and hunger.
This Special Issue of the IMSLA seeks to engage with writings about Ireland and/or Latin America which offer different interdisciplinary perspectives from which to reconsider colonial encounters as well as texts which address the various effects, including psychic effects, provoked by the changing cultural formations of the late twentieth/early twenty-first centuries. These encounters might be framed within or going beyond what Mary Louise Pratt denotes as ‘contact zones’ –i.e. ‘social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other’, or what Avtar Brah defines as ‘diaspora space’, that which ‘marks the intersectionality of contemporary conditions of transmigrancy of people, capital, commodities and culture’– including not only Latin American spaces but Irish spaces also. Therefore, the present issue on Travel Writing aims to consider narratives which could be read against various theoretical frameworks from various fields of knowledge such as history, sociology, anthropology, literature, linguistics among others, in order to highlight different experiences of power relations and cultural practices. We invite papers which interrogate travel between Ireland and Latin America and which examine alternative discourses of travel, whether in an Imperial or contemporary context. All articles will be subject to peer review and must conform to the Contributors Guidelines of the journal.
Articles should not be longer than 5,000 words, including references and notes. Suggested articles include, but are not limited to:

  • Historical or fictional accounts, diaries and reports (official or private) by missionaries, soldiers, diplomats, entrepreneurs among others
  • Encounters between Ireland and Latin America
  • Irish Migration, exile or diasporic writing about Latin America and vice versa
  • Irish/Latin American Interpretation and reinterpretation of travel writing
  • Writing at the margins
  • Women writing and gendered spaces
  • Postmodern and virtual travels
  • Transnational writings

For consideration, please submit articles (as an attached Word document) via email with the subject line “IMSLA Special Issue” by 30 September 2014 to Laura Izarra: lizarra@usp.br

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