Book Description

Going Abroad is a book not only for scholars, academics and students who are interested in different approaches to mobility, but also for non-specialists who wish to explore and understand what lies behind the various forms of travel, tourism and migration that are central to today’s—and no doubt tomorrow’s—globalized world. If you are tempted by emigration, enjoy being a tourist, or just love the adventure of travel, real or imaginary, you can embark on a journey of discovery through time and across the continents to explore and reflect on diverse visions of mobility. The practical problems and the differing states of mind experienced by past and present emigrants to France, Spain, Morocco, Capri, Latin America, Canada and Australia, the impact of immigration on the host communities, and the reactions of turn-of-the-century French immigrants to Britain, offer contrasting and complementary perspectives. Along with the real and symbolic meanings of the apparently mundane act of crossing the Channel, stranger forms of travel are also explored: Filipino sailors who are neither at home nor abroad, backpacking across four continents, the real and the fantasized exotic in nineteenth-century orientalist art, and the sanitized utopias of today’s theme parks. Within an inter-disciplinary and a cross-cultural framework, the book explores the terminology, concepts and methodology of a subject which has become the focus of curricula in many academic courses.