Combining vivid ethnographic detail, postcolonial theory, and readings of Israeli and Palestinian popular texts, Stein considers a broad range of Israeli leisure cultures of the Oslo period with a focus on the Jewish desires for Arab things, landscapes, and people that regional diplomacy catalyzed. Moving beyond conventional accounts, she situates tourism within a broader field of “discrepant mobility,” foregrounding the relationship between histories of mobility and immobility, leisure and exile, consumption and militarism. She contends that the study of Israeli tourism must open into broader interrogations of the Israeli occupation, the history of Palestinian dispossession, and Israel’s future in the Arab Middle East. Itineraries in Conflict is both a cultural history of the Oslo process and a call to fellow scholars to rethink the contours of the Arab-Israeli conflict by considering the politics of popular culture in everyday Israeli and Palestinian lives.
Movements—of people and groups, through travel, migration, exile, and diaspora—are central to understanding both local and global power relationships. But what of more literary moves: textual techniques such as distinct patterns of narrative flow, abrupt leaps between genres, and poetic figures that flatten geographical distance? This book examines what happens when both types of tropes—literal traversals and literary shifts—coexist.
Itineraries of Power examines prose narratives and poetry of the mid-Heian to medieval eras (900–1400) that conspicuously feature tropes of movement. Kawashima argues that the appearance of a character’s physical motion, alongside literary techniques identified with motion, is a textual signpost in a story, urging readers to focus on how the work conceptualizes relations of power and claims to authority. From the gendered intersection of register shifts in narrative and physical displacement in the Heian period, to a dizzying tale of travel retold multiple times in a single medieval text, the motion in these works gestures toward internal conflicts and alternatives to existing structures of power. The book concludes that texts crucially concerned with such tropes of movement suggest that power is always simultaneously manufactured and dismantled from within.
In 1456 and again in 1458, William Wey (1405/6–76) set out on journeys across a Europe in turmoil from local conflicts and cross-border expansions. Wey, a Devon priest and bursar of Eton College, had been granted special dispensation by Henry VI to undertake pilgrimages, and he was prompted by his friends to write an account of his itinerant adventures. He collected his stories from his travels to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Spain and later Jerusalem in the fifteen chapters that comprise The Itineraries.
The Itineraries contains practical travel advice for the period on conduct and currency, alongside comparative English, Latin, Greek and Hebrew vocabularies, in addition to a remarkable scrapbook compendium of places, roads, and distances. Originally written in English and Latin, Wey’s fascinating observations of a changing Europe are for for first time available in a modern English edition. The pilgrimage was an idea essential to medieval and early modern Christianity, and Wey’s work adds a new dimension to our understanding of its importance and practice. Wey is at once adventurous and highly observant, and The Itineraries will be of interest to scholars of early modern history and armchair pilgrims alike.
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