THE LIMITS OF TRAVEL: YOKO TAWADA'S FICTIONAL TRAVELOGUES

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe article argues that many of Yoko Tawada's writings are best understood as forms of travel writing. An analysis of Talisman, ‘Wo Europa anfängt’, and Überseezungen demonstrates how they explore diverse experiences of mobility, from migration, to colonial expansion, to more cosmopolitan forms of leisure travel and tourism. In their emphasis on various forms of travel, Tawada's writings avoid the careless celebration of dislocation and instead display ambivalence towards the effects of displacement. They highlight how travel can disrupt the universalist pretensions of one's own point of view and render meaningless identities based on notions of nation or territory. However, they also question whether travel, especially in its more contemporary forms, can offer the sort of radical change of environment that might facilitate such a disturbance of subjectivity. Talisman and ‘Wo Europa anfängt’ both show how travel may in fact reinforce notions of essential cultural identities, while Überseezungen illustrates how the increasing uniformity of modern‐day travel can make movement between locations less distinct, thus offering no alternatives of perspective or identification. These three works thus cast doubt on the subversive potential of displacement that is often posited by cultural studies.