Minority reports: travel, language and the politics of microspection

Abstract

This article investigates the relationship between travel and the notion of minority. It argues that the idea of “minority” opens up a multiplicity of perspectives not bound by the necessary pieties of place. The first part of the essay explores the consequences of writing about travel in a language that is widely accepted as a minority language, Irish Gaelic. The second part stresses the relational as opposed to the essentialist nature of what constitutes “minority”. It considers how particular forms or ways of travelling in a major language can reveal “minoritised” dimensions to the language and its culture(s) which are normally occluded. In this context, it will analyse Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks (2015) where Macfarlane’s journeys through the “Word-Hoard” of English illuminate landscapes of dispossession and discovery. In the third section, attention will be drawn to another language minority in society – a group who have their own language within language – children. In particular, the article will consider how the travel trope which is at the heart of so much classic children’s literature raises ethico-political considerations about language and culture in the context of a renewed political ecology.