Page - 10 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020

10 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Birgit Englert, Sandra Vlasta | Travel Writing On the relation between travel writing studies and mobility studies Somewhat surprisingly, the fields of travel writing studies and mobility studies are not as closely related as one would expect, given their shared focus on mobile subjects. Whereas travel writing studies explores how mobile subjects recount their mobile experiences, mobility studies adds other forms of mobility to the analytic framework, most notably the mobility of objects and ideas/concepts, as well as virtual mobilities. Although mobility has clearly always shaped cultures and societies, its central relevance to the analysis of cultures and societies has not always been recognized. This changed with Mimi Sheller and John Urry’s (2006) introduction of the ‘new mobilities paradigm’, which brought the many intersecting forms of mobility to the attention of researchers in the social sciences and, eventually, the humanities. While mobility was generally regarded in highly positive terms in much of the research conducted within the new paradigm, Glick Schiller and Salazar (2013) emphasized the power relations at stake in determining whose mobility is encouraged, or at least not blocked, and whose is inhibited. They thus proposed that we focus on the ‘regimes of mobility’ that shape the various forms of mobilities and immobilities in a given setting. Both conditions can be forms of privilege, depending on the context within which im/mobilizations occur, and thus their effects must be examined in each case. Structural categories such as gen- der, age, class, race, and the like have an impact on all forms of mobility, and thus on travel. While travel and tourism have been key issues in mobility studies from early on (cf. Urry 2002; Urry and Larsen 2011), travel writing has recently become a topic of great interest in mobility studies. In 2016, for example, the journal Transfers featured a section on ‘Travel Wri- ting and Knowledge Transfer’, put together by guest editors Florian Krobb and Dorit Müller (2016/3), which focused on travel writing in imperial and colonial contexts, proposing that we conceive of knowledge produced while traveling as ‘itinerant knowledge’. Mobility studies have also increasingly had an impact on travel writing studies, which Fors- dick calls ‘a literature of mobility’ (2019: 155). As he writes in his entry ‘Mobility’ in the above- mentioned Keywords for Travel Writing Studies, ‘[m]obility has the potential to root the study of travel writing in the material conditions of the journey’, a notion that Forsdick borrows from Stephen Greenblatt’s Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto (2010). Forsdick further observes that the apparent neutrality of the term ‘has the potential to avoid more value-laden and “historically tainted” (Clifford 1997, 110) designations such as “travel” and “tourism”, allowing clearer com- parison of the intersecting experiences and trajectories of those in motion’ (Forsdick 2019: 155). Readers and scholars of travel writing are thus challenged to pay attention to the representa- tions of various regimes of mobility in travel writing (see Forsdick 2019: 155). Such an approach also has the potential to prevent travel writing studies from falling prey to the criticism that it focuses primarily on privileged narratives written by travellers in possession of internationally valid passports and the financial means to be as mobile as they wish. A key privilege associated with travel, as opposed to other types of mobility, concerns the form in which the journey is documented; travellers can usually choose from a variety of options when it comes to how they document their mobility. Even if they do not document their travels, this is usually a conscious choice, whereas people who move — voluntarily or involuntarily — for reasons other than tra- vel (i.e. flight, migration, business) often have fewer resources (financial and/or mental) to dedi- cate to the documentation of their mobility. Furthermore, the construction of the traveller as a