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Faire le Monde: Premiers Globetrotters et Tours du Monde Touristiques (1869-1914)

Making the World: First Globetrotters and Tourist Tours of the World (1869-1914)

Tipologia
Progetti internazionali
Ente finanziatore
Swiss National Science Foundation
Settore ERC
SH5_8 - Cultural studies, cultural identities and memories, cultural heritage
SH6_9 - Modern and contemporary history
SH6_11 - Global history, transnational history, comparative history, entangled histories
SH7_1 - Human, economic and social geography
Periodo
01/02/2023 - 31/01/2027
Coordinatore
Jean-François Staszak
Responsabile
Sonia Favi
Odile Gannier
Fabio Rossinelli
Vanessa Schwartz

Partecipanti al progetto

Descrizione del progetto

The project "Faire le Monde: Premiers Globetrotters et Tours du Monde Touristiques (1869-1914)" focuses on the first tourist tours of the world (TdM) (1869-1914) and questions the new regime of geography that they reflect and help to establish. It defines TdMs as journeys made by people who claim to travel essentially for their own pleasure and who claim to be tourists, and not (exclusively) explorers, journalists, diplomats, etc. The project questions the stakes, logics and meanings - notably geographical - of this new tourist practice and its institutionalization. 

In doing so, the project moves from two hypotheses.
The first postulates that TdMs correspond to a major mutation of the Western tourist industry and geographical imagination, which for the first time apprehend the globe as an attraction and a place that can literally be toured.
The second postulates that the importance and significance of the TdM motif and its diffusion in popular culture went beyond the circle of tourists well-off enough to travel the globe, through the role of more or less immersive simulation devices that allowed almost everyone to make a virtual TdM.

The main research question is to critically question the process of objectification of the World by these actual and virtual TdMs, as an important step of globalization and modernity. In order to answer that question, the research focuses on three types of corpus. All the materials will be analyzed in a double perspective, as traces and vehicles: as witnesses of actual TdM, and as a means to make a virtual TdM by following the steps of the narrator, the photographer or the guide. The three corpora correspond to three approaches.
The first approach concerns archives related to TdMs that have been carried out. At the center of the project is the journey of Emilio Balli from Ticino (1878), which is exemplary and documented by exceptionally rich and complete untapped private archives. Interested in the place of Switzerland in the TdM, both as a sender and receiver country, we have identified nine Swiss globetrotters who made a TdM in the period, documented by largely
unpublished sources that we have been able to locate. The analysis of their journeys makes sense in the context of a global micro-history.
The second is published books that relate or present TdMs. We have identified 260 accounts of TdMs between 1869 and 1914, published mainly in English and French, but also, for seven of them, in Japanese. A database will be built with these accounts. From a comparative literature perspective, the analysis will make it possible to identify common structures and motifs, but also lines of rupture attesting to an evolution over time and undoubtedly to differences according to gender, class and nationality. This corpus is completed by publications from actors in the tourism industry: eleven guides and advertising brochures relating to TdM were identified, and the archives of two tour operators were explored.
From a visual studies perspective, the third studies devices consisting of series of images produced by a photographer or a filmmaker on the occasion of a TdM (real or fictitious), sometimes within a group of tourists, and presented in such a way as to allow the public to virtually remake this TdM. We have selected two of them, because of their intrinsic interest and the most accessible sources: two series of stereoscopic photographs "Around the world" by the Underwood company (1905 and 1913) and nine cinematographic productions that require and/or feature a TdM (between 1906 and 1914). We will examine in detail and in an intermedial framework how the TdM motif spreads to impose itself in popular culture, allowing everyone to make a virtual TdM.
In a transversal way, within the framework of a global history and in order to avoid a Eurocentric approach, a particular attention will be given to the place of Japan in these TdMs by analyzing, through the methods of crosshistory, on the one hand, the practices and the reception of Western globetrotters in Japan and, on the other hand, those of the rare Japanese globetrotters (travelling on the occasion of 3 TdMs organized in 1908-1910) in the West.

It is thus at the crossroads of cultural geography and global history that this project aims to analyze an important but little-known tourist practice that plays a notable role in a major change in the way the world is understood and that has a profound impact on popular culture.

The project is led by Jean-François Staszak (Université de Genève) and involves partners from Università di Torino, University of Southern California, Università della Svizzera Italiana, Université Côte d'Azur, as well as a number of hired researchers and external collaborators. It will result in (i) publications in scientific journals, (ii) workshops on the TdM from 1870 to the present day, (iii) an illustrated book on the TdM and their place in geographical imagination, and (iv) an exhibition (La Manie des tours du Monde) at the Swiss National Museum, scheduled for May 2025.


 

Ultimo aggiornamento: 19/02/2023 18:47
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