Journeys

This article examines the experiences of walkers along the Spanish Camino de Santiago pilgrimage. It explores their journeys as exercises in narrative adjustment, social practices, and somatic experiences of a crippling loss of control over the course of their lives. Using a phenomenological method of descriptions, the article argues that mobility is a trope that expresses existential issues in a bodily idiom. It draws attention to the value of inter-subjective experience as a potential source of existential mobility, one that finds metaphorical expression in the slow daily rhythms structuring pilgrims' journeys and that impacts on the researcher as much as the pilgrims.

Recognising that the beginning of a new millennium can also signal a broadening interest in looking at our world in new ways, the editors of Journeys present this new journal dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of travel and travel writing. To say that travelling, touristing or simple wandering are among the most widespread of human activities is only to claim the obvious: this has been the case since the beginnings of our species, even if it has only been during the last century or so that the true economic and social import of travel – within cities, from hills to plains, between continents – has become clearly understood and delineated.

This article explores the graphic reportage of Joe Sacco and his comic book travels through the conflict zones of Bosnia and Palestine. It traces the roots of travel writing comics to the politically antagonistic work of underground artists such as Robert Crumb and S. Clay Wilson, the alternative autobiographical scene that followed and how this informs the work of Sacco. The article analyzes two of Sacco's texts in particular, Palestine (2003) and Safe Area Gorazde (2000), looking at them as a whole and subjecting individual panels and sequences to close readings. This analysis teases out the ways in which Sacco engages with trauma and the wounded. It argues that although explicit violent imagery could be considered exploitative and voyeuristic, Sacco uses it to restore a sense of humanity to those dehumanized by the pace of globalized media.

The articles in this issue highlight the relationship between collective memory and tourism. In what ways are practices of collective remembering implicated with those of tourism? Where do collective memory scholarship and tourism studies meet? How might the two interdisciplinary academic fields be shaped through each other’s concepts? We suggest that experiencing the collective past is integral to specific forms of tourism, particularly what is called ‘heritage tourism’. So, too, are certain kinds of public practices of collective remembering increasingly connected with the tourism industry. In the absence of, or complementary to, financial support for the historic preservation efforts, the entrepreneurial approach to the collective past turns objects of such memory into tourist attractions to keep them economically viable. Thinking about collective remembering in relation to tourism directs our analytical focus to the authority of experiencing the past in a specific tourist place in the present. It centres our attention on what is involved in making this experience possible.

This essay argues that the construction of the Jewish Museum Berlin and the Berlin Holocaust Memorial constitutes a paradigm shift in Holocaust commemoration in Germany. The structures architecturally resemble their US counterparts and particularly the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum more than they do the other memorials and museums in Berlin’s complex commemorative landscape. American responses to the European catastrophe have significantly impacted European commemorative forms. Indeed, an internationally recognizable memorial architecture seems to be emerging, one emphasizing gaps, voids, incongruities and the personal relation to what theorists and commentators have begun to call ‘negative’ or ‘evil sublime’. Contemporary memorials and museums are not designed to ‘merely’ house collections; rather, they draw attention to themselves as symbols and symptoms of traumatic memory. They act out the trauma of the Holocaust as architecture; walking through them is supposed to be a step towards working through that trauma as feeling and experience.