Questions of Travel

“Kaplan’s book presents an excellent exploration of how metaphors and specific terms bring with them particular ideological formations. Her account of differences and similarities across the field of cultural theory in the Euro-American academy offers the reader a useful mapping of discursive relations. Her final two chapters, which focus less on particular texts or theorists and more on situating significant theorists and theories within the field of postcolonial and feminist cultural production, provide especially admirable and nuanced conceptual histories.” - , New Formations

“The potential equivalences and disjunctions between postcolonial and postmodern theory are elegantly foregrounded in Caren Kaplan’s Questions of Travel. . . . Kaplan’s useful readings bring feminist analysis to bear on postmodern discussions of temporality and geography, even as she recognizes that a politics of location is itself dependent on discourses of displacement.” - Kamala Visweswaran , Signs

“With a virtuoso show of ideological savvy . . . Kaplan seeks to analyze how our very sense of geography itself is being remade within the interstices of a global economic, cultural, and media order.” - A. Robert Lee , Immigrants & Minorities

“Questions of Travel is a multilayered inquiry into the ideological function of metaphors in discourses of displacement. Kaplan richly historicizes these metaphors in order to explicate the situated meanings that inhere in the myriad kinds of displacement that characterizes contemporary writing and lives. Her meditations on the rhetorics of displacement—including nomadism, exile, migrancy, and other practices of movement across space—take the reader on an exciting excursion into the fraught politics of travel discourse.” - Donna Haraway, University of California, Santa Cruz