Jews and journeys: travel and the performance of Jewish identity

"Travels of dislocation and return, discovery and conquest, hold a prominent place in formative Jewish and non-Jewish fictions of identity. It would almost seem that wherever a self or community is located it has always dreamed of being elsewhere and used travel writing as a cultural mechanism for exploring and shaping its own fictions of identity. What is it about travel writing that enables it to become one of the central cultural mechanisms for exploring and shaping themes of identity? How does this genre produce representations of an "other" and his world, against which and through which it explores and invents a particular sense of self? How do travel discourses work with and against other forms of cultural representation and give contour to territory and experience? Do the different types of travel construct different types of self, of others, and self-other interaction, and how do the various types of travel writing interact and influence one another? In other words, what cultural and ideological work is performed by these texts? These are some of the questions explored in this volume"--