Travel Prep

Preparing to travel means more than packing your bags. The sections below provide readings, podcasts, and videos to enhance your travel experience and prepare for class assignments.

1. The Grand Tour in Global Context

Begin your introduction to the history of the Grand Tour by reading this site and watching this series. This gives you a broad introduction to the original “Grand Tourist” experience and a glimpse of our itinerary post Covid.

Why do the Grand Tour? In 1670, Richard Lassells published one of the first Grand Tour guidebooks, Voyage Through Italy, in which he cited four reasons for doing the Grand Tour:

Travel as Intellectual Education: By traveling to new places, travelers are exposed to diverse cultures languages and practices which provides opportunities to engage in open dialogue with diverse peoples. This assumes actual engagement with an “other” which may not naturally occur during structured travel.
Travel as Social Education: By participating in new experiences, especially those recognized by elite society as desirable and appropriate (hegemonic), travelers acquire new social graces that can be translated back at home into social status. Such membership in the club of cosmopolitan community may feel different from national norms or local practices back home.
Travel as Cosmopolitan Education: By challenging themselves, travelers gain confidence and skills in self-reliance that comes from a sense of universal citizenship. The transformed traveler has the confidence to travel anywhere…to be “of the world”.
Travel as Political Education. By reflexively examining the particular relative to the whole, travelers develop the ability to contextualize information in a larger setting. They learn to see the local relative to the global and vice versa in what 20th century scholars would call the “Sociological Imagination”.

Clearly, it’d be hard to experience this kind of transformation in two weeks. The 17th and 18th century Grand Tourists would travel for years.

So ask yourself, “Why?” Unfortunately, due to social norms of the time, "difference" and treating other people with universal human rights wasn't happening...in fact, the money to pay for travel for Grand Tourists through the 19th century often came directly or not so indirectly from enslaved labor. In "decolonizing" the grand tour, we are layering a global awareness on top of the Grand Tour narrative. Where did the money come from? This page gives you a brief overview of how the transatlantic slave trade created the African diaspora. But that's not the end of the story. Lot's of people traveled, not just rich young men. What were their reasons for traveling? We'll meet a cast of characters through this travel prep who will help us see how mobility matters.

Other than fulfilling a UK Core requirement, in what ways does travel add to your education as a person? How might you translate those gains upon return? Can you study yourself as a tourist? Are you ready to engage in the journey? Before continuing on to the next section, take a few minutes to watch Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Video interview on Cosmopolitanism and begin to think about the ways in which travel might or might not allow a person to acquire cosmopolitan dispositions.

Trip Prep Assignment #1: Autobiography of Travel

Reflecting on what you've just learned about the Grand Tour and "acquiring cosmopolitan dispositions", complete this worksheet detailing your own history of travel--can be physical or virtual. In what ways have you had the privilege of being mobile and in what ways has your mobility been constrained? Consider the practicalities...who planned your travel? Who paid for it? And consider the implications for the trip ahead...how has your past prepared you (or not) for your future?

GO TO WORKSHEET

2. Counter-narratives to "The Beaten Path"

Our first two readings about traveling to Europe expand upon two kinds of storylines: fugitive tales and contemporary Black post-colonial fiction. A core element of these stories are the relationships between Black protagonists, the structural and often personal racism they encounter, and their allies. These readings follow the typical travel narrative (a starting place, the journey, personal transformation, returning home), but with very different perspectives from the traditional white gaze. See below for your assignment to help you prepare to read.

Reading Three Years in Europe

You can find William Wells Brown's writing online. We'll be reading Three Years in Europe: Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met which WWB published in London in 1852. William Wells Brown was born near Lexington, Kentucky and the forward of the book (i-xxix) gives a brief biography told in 3rd person by WWB himself. The “chapters” are very short as their original versions might have been published as “letters from abroad” in newspapers which was very common at the time. He then collected his writings into books which is how he supported his travel along with giving lectures to Abolitionist groups. He reuses narrative from a previously published fugitive tale which was also a common practice at the time (as was "borrowing" from other authors).

You can skip through some of his travels to his arrival in London and subsequent travel to Paris and back to London (22-133). William Wells Brown's letters read like a travel journal, but also as social criticism. His style is very similar to that of Mark Twain’s Innocent’s Abroad, but the two men had very different histories.

As you read, highlight passages that a)describe the relationships noted above and b)describe places/events/people he encountered in London and Paris. We'll be using these in our own class "guidebook"

Reading The Color Line.

You can access an electronic copy on Amazon (also available in audio). Why are we reading this novel? The author, Igiaba Scego, is an award winning Italian writer who has a particularly place-based way of telling stories. This novel also has both historical (late 1800s) and current perspectives on what it means to travel to Italy AND to be Italian today. A few things you need to know about the book:

Be prepared for strong language and violent events. This is fiction, but as you will see in the opening chapter, it is based on historical events which are not pleasant.
The character Lafuna Brown is based on two real American women: Edmonia Lewis and Sarah Parker Remond. The sexual violence that happens to Lafuna at Coberlin reflects in part what may have happened to Edmonia Lewis at Oberlin in 1864 and what happened to Sarah Parker Remond when she was violently removed from seeing an opera in Boston in 1853. Scego uses her artistic license to blend these events into the fictional narrative. Take the time to click through and read about these two women.
Lafuna Brown’s story is framed as a memoir written as an older woman in Rome about her coming of age and eventual travel to Europe and it includes a fictional romance with a character based on Frederick Douglass. You’ll recognize historic events from his life too.
Alternating with Lafuna’s chapters are those of Leila, a Somali-Roman art curator. Her story is also based in part on real places and events and is auto-biographical of the author, Igiaba Scego. The story therefore includes not only Rome but Eritrea and Somalia, lands colonized by Italy in the late 19th century, but not well understood--even by Italians.
As Lafuna travels from Buffalo to Europe and eventually Italy, notice again the relationships she has with structural and personal racism and her allies as well as her internal journey in becoming a free Black artist in Europe.

Again, as you read, highlight passages that a)describe the relationships noted above and b)describe places/events/people the two protagonists encounter in London, Paris, Florence and Rome (they also go to Venice...but we won't have time in our program).

Trip Prep Assignment #2: Guidebook

To prepare for doing assignments while you travel, you'll need to make some decisions about where you want to go and why in each of the cities we visit. Using your notes from the readings so far, add to our class database of sites. There are three tabs: 1) Places mentioned in our readings, 2)Program destinations we'll do as a group, & 3) Your Bucket List of places/things you'd like to do. From your reading, identify a site (or two) to add to our list. You'll want to add an excerpt from the text as well as info you've found from the internet. Then add to the Bucket List tab places or spaces you want to visit while we're traveling. We'll flesh out these ideas before we go.

GO TO DATABASE

Linking Our Timeline

The three readings below present three different storylines of travelers to Europe from the United States through the specific lens of African-American women. The stories are not intended to frame travel for African-Americans as problematic but to celebrate the possible. These are stories of mobility and transformation. We use these stories to help us change the way that we look at travel, particularly the beaten path of the grand tour, from a different starting point.

Sarah Parker Remond 19th Century

Althea Hurst Scapbook 20th century

Millennial Influencers…21st century

Our themes: cosmopolitanism, mobility, and transformation, permeate these stories. In what ways can you imagine these themes influencing how you might design your own inquiry while traveling. What would you call your story? What would the your thesis be?

In your submission below, you are asked to name your project. Titles are powerful. Think of yourself as a scholar/artist setting out on a great adventure. If you are in the global section, you will be writing an autographic report when you return. What is it called? If you are in the arts and creativity section, you will be creating a longform blog post incorporating images/excerpts of your Creative products. What is it called? Play with your ideas and draft an abstract for your project to accompany your title. In the art world, this is called an artist’s statement. Don’t worry about getting it right. This is a chance to think deeply about everything you have read, your dreams for what you will do while you are traveling, and your musings about might say as a global scholar/artist when you get back.

Click Here for Worksheet