Critical Arts

Affective Encounters, Alternative Modernities and Travel Narratives between China and the World

This special issue (re)examines travel narratives of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as an affective archive of Sino-foreign encounters in the context of various concepts of modernity. Travel narratives from metropolitan centers to Asia have generated substantial scholarship; yet, despite some interesting case studies, the rich corpus of narratives circulating between the non-core regions of the world system and China remains comparatively overlooked. The goal of this special issue is to foreground underrepresented Anglo-American travel narratives, such as those by women, and to draw attention to understudied African, Latin American, Asian, and Eastern European narratives about China, as well as Chinese travelogues about both the center and peripheral regions.

Focusing on travel narratives by foreigners in China and Chinese abroad in the pivotal period between the Treaty of Nanking (1842) and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (1949), we invite reflections on the contested pathways through which modern China was imagined and forged not through simple imitation, but through a complex process of translation, appropriation, and resistance.

We welcome original research articles that address foreign travelers in China and Chinese travelers abroad, with particular attention to:

• Travel narrative as a genre that registers affective encounters.
• Concepts of modernity employed by travel writers.
• The affective dimensions of alternative modernities.
• Travelling bodies and visceral modernities in cross-cultural encounters.
• Cross-cultural friendship and solidarity as political and ethical practices.
• Ethnic comparisons and their affective dimensions.
• Gendered perspectives on travel and affect, particularly women’s accounts.
• The material and visual cultures of modern transcultural travels.
• Emotional geographies of treaty ports, steamships, and modern infrastructures.
• Subaltern and non-elite mobilities and their affective archives.