Olaudah Equiano, Accidental Tourist

Datos Bibliográficos

ID16004276
AutoresGeraldine Murphy (autor de correspondencia)
Año1994
Volumen27
Número4
Páginas551-551
Fecha de publicación1994-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaEighteenth-Century Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0013-2586 • E-ISSN: 1086-315X
EditorialJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2739439
OpenAlexW2327324141
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas16

As MOST READERS WILL RECOGNIZE, my title refers to Anne Tyler's recent novel, The Accidental Tourist. Macon, the protagonist, writes travel guides for business types who loathe traveling. The logo for his series a stuffed living room chair sprouting wings: While armchair travelers dream of going places, traveling armchairs dream of staying put. Like his readers, the leery Macon resists travel to territories unknown, psychological or geographical; living in a cocoon of familiar and familial habits to ward off the contingencies of postmodern life, he an accidental tourist who stubbornly takes the heimlich with him wherever he goes. The author of an eighteenth-century slave narrative, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, an accidental tourist of another sort. Kidnapped from his home in Benin (now Nigeria) at the age of eleven, he transported from owner to owner in a bewildering series of transfers from the interior of the continent to a slave ship bound for the new world. Unlike Macon, of course, the young Equiano doesn't have the luxury or resources to take his home with him. Travel, bell hooks observes, is not a word that can easily be evoked to talk about the Middle Passage, the Trail of Tears, the landing of Chinese immigrants, the forced relocation of JapaneseAmericans, or the plight of the homeless.' On the contrary, travel connotes a voluntary, temporary change of environment. The autonomy, leisure, self-cultivation, and intellectual curiosity associated

Accidental · Archaeology · Geography · Physics · Tourism · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Travel Writing and Literature