Motion&Emotion: Moving Bodies, Touring Subjects

Abstract

The paper explores the concept of ‘radical mobility’ as the historical result of accumulated diasporas in modern and post-modern culture, and as the distinctive lifestyle pattern of today’s transversal communities, both real and imaginative, that dwell along the paths designed by old and new globalisation. In this view, places and subjects imply a rethinking of the tropes of travel and tourism, whereby places resist the simplistic ‘non’ imagined by Marc Augé, though suffering the grip of consumption detected by Urry. The paper analyses the concept of ‘touring subjects’, i.e., regular movers that revive “nomadic” attitudes (Braidotti) and are attached to “temporary identities” (Augé), entangled in constant but unpredictable desires of consumption (Appadurai). Although not yet totally nullified in their ability to make sense, react, produce emotion and agency, ‘touring’ figures and voices are widely represented in literature and in the media, and can be found at the crossroads of many crucial cultural and aesthetic stances, as well as in topical situations not devoid of moments of serious crisis, dramatic choices and even tragic events. Associated to authorial narrative figures caught up and lost in the puzzle of their multiperspective narrations, these subjects face paradoxical, unprecedented conditions in their being strongly exposed to multicultural, hyperreal complexities that go far beyond the common post-modern rethorics, whose social and political potentiality is still to be imagined and acknowledged.