Travel and Revelations

The Travel Notes of a Black Haired Woman by Buket Uzuner recounts the author’s adventures as she backpacked over 7 years across three continents: Africa, Asia and Europe. This text lends itself to different types of analysis. Uzuner’s preconceptions and the revelations and transformation she experiences speak to the Orientalist notions she had imbued before embarking on her voyages. In addition to a linguistic analysis of the narrative based on close reading  strategies to compare how geographic regions are described and discussed, as Uzuner’s trips were motivated by different reasons tourism, study abroad, research  Micallef’s presentation will examine the notion of what is or what is not travel using James Buzzard's work as a starting point.  She will discuss for example whether writing about backpacking simply as a tourist can be analyzed with the same tools  as writing about study abroad. Finally Uzuner first published some parts of this manuscript under an assumed name in a journal. She described publishing the volume as murdering the original writer. Thus this presentation will also dwell on the issues of presentation of the self after having written under an assumed name. Micallef also intends to complicate the question of “Muslim woman” traveler by examining how religion and gender or their intersection have a marked effect on how she sees and writes about her voyages.