GLORIA ANZALDÚA is the author of Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), in which the essay collected here appears. She is also editor with Cherríe Moraga of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981) and of Making Face/Making Soul/Hacieno Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color (1990). Anzaldúa has taught courses on feminism, Chicano studies, and creative writing at a number of universities, including the University of Texas, Vermont College of Norwich University, and San Francisco State University. She has recently published Interviews/Entrevistas (2000).
JEAN BAUDRILLARD is one of France’s leading intellectuals and critics of modern society, especially as related to the media and consumer culture. Among his many studies are Simulacra and Simulations (1994), Cool Memories (1987), and Seduction (1979). America (1988), from which his selection is taken, is an impressionistic account of his tourist gaze and analysis of postmodern culture. He also published a response to the Gulf War, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991).
WILLIAM BEVIS is professor of American literature, emeritus, at the University of Montana. Interested in Montana and Western writers, Bevis has published Ten Tough Trips: Montana Writers and the West (1990) and served on the editorial board of Last Best Place, an anthology of Montana writing (1988). In addition, he has published Mind of Winter: Wallace Stevens, Meditation and Literature (1989), Borneo Log (1995), and a novel, Shorty Harris, or, the Price of Gold (1999). The essay included in this collection, appeared in Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature, edited Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat (1987).
HOMI BHABHA is the Chester D. Tripp Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where he is a professor of English, art history, and south Asian languages and civilizations and serves on the Committee on the History of Culture. One of the first scholars to articulate postcolonial theory, Bhabha has written widely on the status of the colonized subject. He is the editor of Nation and Narration (1990), the author of The Location of Culture (1994), and the co-author of Colonizer and the Colonized (2001).
MICHEL BUTOR, French novelist and essayist, is a leading figure of the nouveau roman. He has taught at universities in Egypt, Manchester, Salonika, and Geneva, where in 1975 he was appointed “professor extraordinaire.” Among his literary awards are the Fénélon Prize, Renaudot Prize, and Grand Prize for Literary Criticism. Consistent with his efforts to question perception, his essay from Mosaic redefines what we mean by travel and the place of reading and writing in relation to movement and place. Among his many other works are Mobile: A Study for a Representation of the United States (1963) and his best-known novel, La Modification (1957).
MICHEL DE CERTEAU was a French polymath Jesuit priest and held the chair of Historical Anthropology of Beliefs at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. His book The Practice of Everyday Life (1974, trans. 1984), from which the essay “Spatial Stories” is taken, is an important contribution to the understanding of media audiences and cultural studies. Other books by de Certeau include Cultural in the Plural (1974), The Writing of History (1975), and Heterologies: Discourses on the Other (1986). Michel de Certeau died in 1986.
HÉLÈNE CIXOUS is a feminist theorist, novelist, playwright, and educational innovator. A professor of English literature at Paris VIII, she founded the university’s Centre d’Études Féminines, and directs doctoral programs in English literature and in the Centre. Known for developing the concept of l’écriture féminine, she is also a prolific writer whose works include “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays, Inside, and Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing (1993), from which the piece included here is taken.
ERIK COHEN is the George S. Wise Professor, Emeritus, of Sociology at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has conducted sociological and anthropological research in Israel, Peru, the Pacific Islands, and Thailand. Recent publications include Thai Tourism: Hill Tribes, Islands and Open-ended Prostitution (1996), The Commercialized Crafts of Thailand (2000), and The Chinese Vegetarian Festival in Phuket (forthcoming 2001). He was also an associate editor of Encyclopedia to Tourism (2000).
WAYNE FRANKLIN is Davis Distinguished Professor and chair of English at Northeastern University. He is also editor of the University of Iowa’s American Land and Life Series and one of the editors of the Norton Anthology of American Literature. A specialist in American culture, he is the author of Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers: Diligent Writers of Early America (1979), from which the selection is taken, and of A Rural Carpenter’s World (1990), and is editor of Mapping American Culture (1995).
PAUL FUSSELL is University of Pennsylvania’s Donald T. Regan Professor of English Emeritus. He has received the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Emerson Award. His book Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars (1980), from which this selection comes, set the standard for travel study. Among his other books are The Great War and Modern Memory (1977), Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations (1982), and Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays (1988). He is also the editor of the Norton Book of Travel (1987). More recently, he has published his autobiography, Doing Battle (1996).
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN is associate professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Who Set You Flowin?: The African American Migration Narrative (1995), from which her selection is taken. She is also the co-editor of Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African American Travel Writing (1998) and editor of Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends: The Rebecca Primus-Addie Brown Correspondence (1999).
CAREN KAPLAN is associate professor of women’s studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Interested in transnational feminist cultural studies, she has published Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, edited with Inderpal Grewal (1994), Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (1996), and Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms and the State, edited with Norma Alarcón and Minoo Moallem (1999). The essay selected here appeared in Cultural Critique (1987).
ERIC LEED is retired professor of history at Florida International University. A specialist in modern European history, Leed compiled the history of the dynamics of travel, The Mind of the Traveller: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism (1991), from which his selection comes. He is also the author of Shores of Discovery: How Expeditionaries Have Constructed the World (1995) and No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (1979).
DEAN MACCANNELL is chair and professor of environmental design at the University of California, Davis. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1976; 1999) is a classic examination of tourism through the perspective of sociological theory and semiotics. Recently republished, with a new afterword by MacCannell, The Tourist continues to influence theories of society and travel. MacCannell has also written Empty Meeting Grounds (1992) and Time of the Sign: A Semiotic Interpretation of Modern Culture, with Juliet Flower MacCannell (1982).
DOREEN MASSEY is professor of geography at Open University, London. Interested in the theorization of space and place, Massey has published extensively. Among her publications are Spatial Division of Labor: Social Structures and the Geography of Production (1984); Space, Place and Gender (1994), from which her piece is taken; Human Geography Today, of which she is co-editor (1999); and Cities for the Many not the Few, co-authored with A. Amin and N. Thrift (2000). She is also the co-founder and co-editor of Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture.
CARL PEDERSEN is associate professor of English and director of the Center for American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. He is co-editor of American Studies in Scandanavia. His most recent publication (with Maria Diedrich and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., editors) is Black Imagination and the Middle Passage (1999).
GUSTAVO PÉREZ-FIRMAT, a professor at Duke University from 1979 to 1999, is now David Feinson Professor of Humanities at Columbia University, where he teaches in the department of Spanish and Portuguese. The piece selected for this collection comes from the introduction of his book Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way (1994), which won the Eugene M. Kayden University Press National Book Award. His other books include Cuban Condition: Translation and Identity in Modern Cuban Literature (1989), his autobiography Next Year in Cuba: A Cubano’s Coming of Age in America (1995), and My Own Private Cuba (1999).
MARY LOUISE PRATT holds the Oliver H. Palmer Chair in Humanities as a professor in the Spanish and Portuguese and comparative literature departments at Stanford University. She is co-author of Linguistics for Students of Literature (1980) and Women, Culture and Politics in Latin America (1990). She is also the author of Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturalism (1992) and Mujer y ciudadanía: historía de discursos, 1820–1997 (forthcoming). She teaches courses in Latin American literature, colonialism, postcolonialism, cultural studies, and travel literature.
R. RADHAKRISHNAN is professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he teaches courses on critical theory, postcoloniality, poststructuralism, and cultural studies. The essay included here comes from his book Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location (1996). He is also the author of Theory in an Uneven World (2001) and has a number of essays that have appeared in such journals as Social Text, Cultural Critique, and MELUS. He is currently working on a book-length project on the ethics and aesthetics of hybridity.
EDWARD W. SAID is professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, teaching across the fields of history, music, and literature. He was president of the Modern Language Association in 1999, has been a consultant to the United Nations, and served from 1977 to 1991 on the Palestine National Council. Among his books are Orientalism (1978), World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), Culture and Imperialism (1993), Out of Place: A Memoir (1999), and Reflections on Exile (2000). The essay included here was originally published in Granta (1984).
THAYER SCUDDER is professor of anthropology, emeritus, at California Institute of Technology. A scholar in the field of involuntary community relocation, he has worked with various United Nations associations as well as the World Bank. Among his awards are the Solon T. Kimball Award for Public and Applied Anthropology (1984), the Edward J. Lehman Award (1991), and the Bronislaw Malinowski Award (1999). His books include The Gwembe Tonga (1962), Secondary Education and the Formation of an Elite (1979), No Place to Go: Effects of Forced Relocation on Navajos (1982), from which the selection for this collection is taken, For Prayer and Profit: The Changing Role of Beer in Gwembe District (1988), and African Experience with River Basin Development (1993).