An International Interdisciplinary Conference

New Zealand Centre for Latin American Studies
(NZCLAS), Auckland, New Zealand 19-20
September, 2003

Abstract

The last two decades have witnessed an explosion of interest in travel writing. This sense of re-imagining the world through its re-presentation, describing spiralling circles between home and away, here and there, reworks the connection between travel and writing, and travel and the cultural history of modernity. This approach raises urgent questions about the politics of representation and spaces of transculturation, about the continuities between a colonial past and a supposedly post-colonial present, and about the ecological, economic and cultural implications of the globalising projects of modernity.

Recently, ties between New Zealand and Latin America, and between East Asia and Latin America have expanded dramatically. For scholars to evaluate the depth and significance of these ties meaningfully, however, they need to recall that the recent contacts between these entities evolved out of centuries of prior interactions. This Conference seeks to examine the historical and cultural aspects of those interactions, and explores the extent to which New Zealand is, has been and will be a cultural, commercial and political bridge between Latin America and East Asia.

 

It is in this spirit that this Conference will draw attention to the radically new approaches on a variety of experiences of journey and its narratives of the Trans-Pacific South: travel and its cultural practices in which the inscriptions of power are made clearly visible.

Closing Date for Papers: 1 August 2003
Coordinator: Professor Ricardo Cicerchia
Senior Research Fellow
NZCLAS
University of Auckland

Private Bag 92019
Auckland, New Zealand