Minoritised Languages and Travel

The contributions in this collection lay bare frictions between traveller and travelee as well as the inherent instability of social, cultural and language hierarchies. Exploring the personal diaries of two Lady’s companions travelling through Wales at the dawn of the nineteenth century, Kathryn Walchester explores the silencing of the Welsh travelee. A century and a half later, Derek Walcott’s travels through Wales and England resulted in several poetry collections. Marija Bergam locates the Caribbean poet as a writer of a minor literature in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari. Anna-Lou Dijkstra’s analysis of recent German, French and Dutch guidebooks to Wales uncovers how these publications from a dominant language background pre-emptively interpret the travel destination, resulting in often skewed perceptions of a minoritized culture. Eimear Kennedy’s analysis of Irish travelogues about India explores how travelogues composed in endangered languages, such as Gaelic, can originate from a position of relative socio-cultural privilege when placed in contact with the global south. Finally, David Miranda-Barreiro undertakes a close reading of Julio Camba’s travel writings, thereby excavating an unsubtle xenophobia towards Spain’s minoritized languages and regions, not only in Camba’s own writings, but also in past and contemporary critical academic work on the author.