Voyages
Emily Di Dodo, Rachel Hayes
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‘Dicono li Ethiopi’: Ethiopian contributions to Francisco Álvares’s travel account to Ethiopia (c.1540)
Mathilde Alain
doi:10.59860/wph.a27411a

From 1520 to 1526, the Portuguese chaplain Francisco Álvares accompanied a diplomatic embassy to Ethiopia. Following his journey, he wrote the travel account Ho Preste Joam das Indias, published in Portugal in 1540. The original manuscript, presumably in Portuguese, has been lost but five Italian manuscripts survive, several of which were composed posthumously to Álvares. These manuscripts bear differences to the Portuguese publication. The 1542 revision by the Italian humanist Ludovico Beccadelli, La historia d’Ethiopia, is particularly interesting because it includes forty-two addizioni based on exchanges with Ethiopian scholars in Rome, together with additional information disseminated across the account. These Ethiopian addizioni and contributions, mainly about religious and royal customs and geographical information, are the focus of this article. The addizioni open a window onto the presence and contributions of Ethiopian scholars to contemporary intellectual life in Renaissance Europe. They concern details about which Europeans would have been ignorant, even those who had travelled to Ethiopia like Álvares. They show that African as well as European scholars contributed to knowledge of African countries like Ethiopia in Europe — in this case by correcting Álvares’s text during the process of its reception and transmission amongst other European scholars like Beccadelli. These clarifications sought out by Beccadelli for an Italian revision of a text written in Portuguese about a journey through Ethiopia demonstrate the multiplicity of actors involved in a text’s voyage from its composition to its dissemination.

‘I guess what you didn’t understand, you could make up’: Elizabeth Delafield in the Soviet Union — Travel, Travel Writing, Truth-Telling
Nick Hall
doi:10.59860/wph.a383561

The British novelist E M Delafield (1890–1943) visited the Soviet Union in 1936. She published her account of the trip as Straw without Bricks: I Visit Soviet Russia (Macmillan, 1937). Many thousands of foreigners went to the Soviet Union in the 1930s to find ‘truth’ there, and published hundreds of accounts of their visits. Delafield’s book is one of these works — and also one that rewards closer study. The title of her account was self-deprecating. It contrasted Delafield’s offering of the ‘chaff’ of trite experience as against bricks formed of ‘solid’, empirically-mined facts that other travel accounts purported to offer. Yet this text brings us not only a depiction of a journey, but also the chance to interrogate the role of a novelist in truth-telling. Delafield was most famous for her semi-autobiographical novel, Diary of a Provincial Lady, and Straw without Bricks was published as The Provincial Lady in Russia in the United States. Delafield’s self-construction, and the strategy of her publisher, merged with a discourse where questions of sincerity and truth were wide-reaching and important — both to Soviet people, and to their foreign guests. This paper explores Delafield’s position in this discourse. It explores how Delafield’s concern with the imaginative capacity inherent to literature both helped her navigate the Soviet world, and relate elements of it that other accounts often did not show. Thus, we can consider a novelist’s exploration of the lived experience of the ‘Other’, and reflect on the complexity her work represents.

Women and (Im)Possible Journeys in Igiaba Scego’s La linea del colore
Giuseppina Gemboni
doi:10.59860/wph.a4929a8

Travel is a recursive theme in postcolonial literature, for many postcolonial writers address their migrant experience or that of their families, and frequently speak to the diasporic communities in European countries. In her novel La linea del colore (The Color Line), Somali-Italian writer Igiaba Scego explores, among other topics, the idea of travel through the lives of three Black female characters, namely Lafanu Brown, Leila, and Binti. Moving between the past and the present, the Black Atlantic and the Black Mediterranean, Scego creates a significant connection between slavery, colonialism, and today’s migrations through the central Mediterranean route. Lafanu Brown, who represents the past, is an American artist who manages to change her life by travelling to Italy. Leila, who symbolises the present, is an Italian art curator who is free to travel thanks to her ‘strong’ Italian passport. Binti, who embodies future generations, is a young Somali woman who wants to leave her country and move to Europe. Thinking about the Black Mediterranean, in the first part of this article I examine the concept of ‘the color line’ and the way Scego deploys it in this novel. Then, I focus on (im)possible travels and analyse how Scego intervenes in the current debate about migrations in the Mediterranean.

From ‘novel’ to ‘nouvelle’: The journey of Charles Lloyd’s Edmund Oliver into French
Hannah Overton-Gill
doi:10.59860/wph.a5896eb

Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis’s 1803 ‘nouvelle’ La femme philosophe is often approached by scholars as a stand-alone text, considered only in relation to its French author and its circulation in early nineteenth-century France. Yet, on reading the text’s ‘Avertissement’, we discover that Genlis’s ‘nouvelle’ finds its origins in Charles Lloyd’s 1798 novel Edmund Oliver. In claiming that her text ‘n’est qu’une imitation’ of Lloyd’s, Genlis positions La femme philosophe as a step in the journey of the source text, not only across the English-French border, but also across the threshold between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Through close readings of the source and target texts, this paper proposes that Genlis’s La femme philosophe ultimately represents a ‘hijacking’ of Lloyd’s Edmund Oliver. By displacing the male protagonist and introducing references to the French writer Germaine de Staël, Genlis seizes the English novel and leads its characters and its plot towards a new destination, one which is designed to serve the imitator’s purpose of engaging with contemporary French discourse on morality, religion, and female agency. As such, the text itself embodies a transfer of power and ownership from the English author to the French translator: Lloyd’s ‘novel’ becomes Genlis’s ‘nouvelle’.

Losing the Self: Identity, Gender and Migration in Ekaterina Bakunina’s Last Novel
Veselina Dzhumbeva
doi:10.59860/wph.a698b32

This paper delves into the depiction of national and gendered identities in Bakunina’s last novel, Li͡ubovʹ k shesterym, with the aim of introducing Ekaterina Bakunina, an overlooked figure of the first-wave Russian emigration to Paris. As a woman writer with a background in law and science, Bakunina stands out from her female contemporaries with her focus on the authentic physicality and sexuality of the woman, and her emphasis on the loss of identity, particularly gender identity, makes her an important voice in the interwar diaspora. By analysing Bakunina’s work, the article uncovers an evolution in her writing style from a portrayal of the experiences of Russian emigration to a more universal depiction of the position of women in society. The article focuses primarily on the two tiers of identity: national and gender and reveals a surprising similarity in their structures as well as an interesting interplay between the two.

Against Closure and Identification: Textual-Visual Trajectories in Mona Ahmed and Dayanita Singh’s Myself Mona Ahmed (2001)
Aman Sinha
doi:10.59860/wph.a6b3951

This article examines Myself Mona Ahmed (2001), a collection of letters written by one of Delhi’s famous hijra personalities — Mona Ahmed, interspersed with photographs of Mona taken over a decade by renowned photographer Dayanita Singh. I first locate the text within Cáel M. Keegan’s conceptualization of good and bad trans objects. Keegan critiques how contemporary liberal representations of trans experiences actually operate within the normative visuality of binary arrangements of gender and sex, idealizing linear movement from one gender into another as the penultimate aspiration of all gender variant individuals. As opposed to this, Singh and Mona refuse aspects of linearity and closure in their autobiographical journeys and present a conception of text-subject that constantly exceeds frameworks of the gender binary. This enables them to rework conventional understandings of autobiography as progressive narratives of an individual self, by employing an aesthetic of literary-visual intermediality. This operates at three levels of relationality in the narrative: between the textual and visual elements, between Mona and Singh as shifting subjects in the narrative, and between the text and the reader. In constantly pushing against closure, Singh and Mona defy the reader’s expectations of having ‘known’ the autobiographical subject through the act of reading. Through that, the narrative becomes an active site of protest in an ethos where gender-variant bodies are being increasingly bureaucratised and assimilated within essentialist discourses of nationhood and identity.