As Holtz and Masse (2012) argued, scholarly attention to travel literature gathered momentum in the 1970s. The dismantling of the colonial empires transformed colonial history and ideology into central objects of inquiry, revealing affinities between anticolonial critique – from Fanon and Césaire to Memmi – and critical approaches to travel writing. This renewed scholarly attention expanded the corpus beyond canonical European travelogues to include Ancien Régime texts, missionary accounts, relations from New France, and texts long dismissed as merely documentary. Scholars such as Lestringant, Yerasimos and Turbet-Delof revisited early modern travel writing for its literary qualities, while in the Francophone world, bibliographies, editions, and archival recovery helped transform forgotten travel accounts into legitimate literary objects.
However, this rehabilitation has also raised definitional questions. The récit de voyage, labelled relation de voyage, littérature viatique, or discours de découverte, has long been considered a genre without rules that feeds on other discursive registers. This session engages this openness, expanding the corpus to include legal documents, missionary accounts, ethnographic narratives and diasporic fiction. All the texts considered belong to the field of travel writing and reshape the genre according to specific literary, historical, and ideological concerns.
This sessions explores how travel narrative moves beyond Eurocentric models through new travelers, routes, and cultural perspectives. Spanning early modern translation, tourism, diaspora, and postcolonial migration, the session shows how travel writing in the French and Francophone world is reshaped by linguistic mediation, cultural circulation, and changing ideas about who travels, who speaks, and what counts as travel. Through four distinct perspectives, the panel traces this transformation across different periods and places, showing how the genre moves beyond the simple construction of otherness.
Timothy Messen’s paper, “Translating Canoes in New France,” studies early modern missionary and travel writings to show how the Indigenous word and object canot become a site of linguistic and cultural transfer. Through different readings, the paper argues that travel is shaped by translation and Indigenous knowledge rather than simple discovery.
Dr. Georges Van Den Abbeele’s “Touring with Stendhal: Grand or Not-so Grand?” argues that Stendhal’s Mémoires d’un touriste reworks the aristocratic Grand Tour as a more democratic and self-reflexive travel narrative. Shifting away from exoticism and cultural superiority, Stendhal foregrounds critique, irony, and the literary dignity of everyday travel, making the text a hinge between the Grand Tour and modern travel writing.
Catheline Désiré’s “Exile and Return: Diasporic Discourse in the Contemporary Haitian Context” rethinks travel through exile and return by reading Roumain’s Master of the Dew in light of contemporary Haitian migration. The paper places Roumain in dialogue with broader diasporic thought to ask whether return can still function as a meaningful political, ecological, and diasporic remedy for Haiti today.
Finally, Dr. Coraline Kandassamy’s “‘Alala’ and the Poetics of Departure: Travel, Migration, and Francophone Relationality” reads Meryl’s song “Alala” as as a contemporary travel narrative, showing how migration from Martinique to France becomes a reflection on belonging, movement, and postcolonial identity within the Francophone world through music, memory, and cultural negotiation.
Across the panel, travel appears as translation, tourism, exile, migration, and affective departure, revealing mobility as a source of cultural contact and self-understanding and a site shaped by linguistic, colonial, and political structures across Francophone spaces.
The session will consist of four thirteen-minute papers, followed by fifteen minutes of discussion. Because the papers are closely connected, the discussion period will be essential for drawing out shared concerns and productive differences.
This selection brings together voices from different periods, locations, and narrative forms, from early modern New France to the contemporary Francophone Caribbean. It foregrounds perspectives such as translation, Indigenous mediation, tourism, diaspora, and postcolonial cultural production, enriching the study of travel narrative in Francophone contexts.