or wherever. These notions are usually rooted in idealized images: Jerusalems of the imagination. Lamentations about the loss of the real England, for example, customarily derive from a version of a dreamed landscape shaped by Ealing comedies or films starring Hugh Grant, conservative (and Conservative) delusions about the good old days, and countless fantasies of pastoral community. They are, for the most part, based on romanticized images untouched and untarnished by time, or by current reality.
The notion of the real Spain is filtered through imperfect recollections of Hemingway’s heroic landscapes, populated by noble and silent men, and mysterious dark-haired, temperamental women of outstanding, if menacing, beauty; but are the beaches of Benidorm really less authentic, less real, than the sawdust bars of Pamplona? British tourists drinking lager in the pubs by Levantine Beach look very real. What would an unreal Spain look like? Where is it? In short, notions of authenticity are usually expressions of romantic nostalgia for lost worlds that exist, if at all, in fictions, myths of nation and identity, thoughtless study abroad marketing, and, of course, tourist offices.
Study abroad is littered with romantic versions of national identity filtered through some combination of stereotype, manufactured tradition, iconic images, advertising, commerce, and myth. In reality the true Spaniard is as likely to be an accountant as a bullfighter and there are, anecdotally, more accountants than bullfighters in Madrid.
Conclusion: This Is a Fine Romance
It is apparent that there are many ways in which consideration of romance resonates with the endeavor of study abroad. It may offer a metaphor for understanding student engagement with new spaces; in the Romantic imagination, it represents a form of enriched and heightened sensibility that could profitably disturb and disrupt students’ preconceptions; in an alternative sense, it should teach us what to avoid: the dissemination of unchallenged stereotypes.
Perhaps most significantly the Romantic Movement reminds us of the power that creative thought and imaginative introspection has to reshape ways in which we see the world. If our students learn what Michael Ferber identifies as a key element in the Romantic imagination, we will surely enrich their lives:
The imagination was not a blank slate, not just the passive power to register, remember and compare perceptions or “images,” but an active power to shape the perceptions themselves in fundamental ways. And everyone had it. (2010: xx)
In Blanning’s view “the romantic revolution is not over yet” (2010: 186). The potential for profound alteration remains within all of us as we contemplate, explore, and analyze the troubled spaces of our world.
Dr. Michael Woolf is the deputy president for strategic development at CAPA Global Education Network. Mike has had much of his career in an international context. Prior to working in mainstream international education, he taught American literature in the universities of Hull, Middlesex, Padova, and Venice and worked as a researcher-writer for BBC radio. He has held leadership roles in international education for many years with FIE, CIEE, and Syracuse University. He has written widely on international education and cultural studies. He serves on a number of boards and was a member of the Board of Directors of the Forum on Education Abroad from 2006 to 2012.
Notes
1. Cited in Blanning 2010, 9.
2. From a cynical viewpoint it may be argued that the exclamation mark, a recurrent indication of multiple epiphanies in Romantic poetry, is a form of hyperbole that resonates with the kinds of inflated rhetoric familiar in study abroad. Beyond that somewhat superficial critique, there is also a more positive implication for our learning objectives.
References
Berlin, Isiah. 1999. The Roots of Romanticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Blanning, Tim. 2010. The Romantic Revolution. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Ferber, Michael. 2010. Romanticism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Galitz, Kathryn Calley. Romanticism. Department of European Paintings, Metropolitan Museum of Art, http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/roma/hd_roma.htm, accessed 29 April 2015.
Johnson, Martha. 2012. “City as Relationship.” In The City as Text: Urban Environments as the Classroom in Education Abroad, Occasional Paper 1, ed. A. Gristwood and M. Woolf, 32–35. London and Boston: CAPA International Education.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1817. “Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni.” In History or a Six Weeks Tour through a part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland. London: Hookham, 177.
Wordsworth, William. 1888. “The Prelude, Book Fourteenth.” In The Complete Poetical Works. London: Macmillan.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the students who participated in our studies and contributed to this volume, the study-abroad and volunteering-abroad professionals who welcomed us as we carried out these studies, colleagues who commented on our presentation based on these chapters at the Forum on Education Abroad conference in 2013, and our family and friends who helped us formulate the ideas and supported us while we engaged in this work. We would also like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers; we have tried to integrate into this volume our reactions to their helpful and stimulating comments. The text’s deficiencies are wholly our responsibility.
PART I
Introduction
CHAPTER 1
Affect and Romance in Study and Volunteer Abroad
Introducing our Project
Neriko Musha Doerr and Hannah Davis Taïeb
Romance is at the heart of our travel fever. We romanticize landscapes, people, languages, and the very fact of moving across borders, of encountering and learning something new, of transforming ourselves as well as others. Study abroad and volunteering abroad are fueled by these passions, by this romance. And along with this romantic passion comes other emotions: fear of the unknown mixed with thrilling attraction to its temptations; longing for liberation; yearning to make a difference; guilt about one’s privilege; moral righteousness; and hope for growth, transformation, and enlightenment.
What kind of affect helps students form deep, long-lasting relationships with people during their travels? What kind of affect thwarts or dehumanizes encounters? What kind of affect drives study abroad students to understand their sociocultural surroundings and participate in wider social activities? What kind of affect leads them to withdraw into transient observer or consumer positions? How do study and volunteering abroad programs generate, shape, or transform such affect? What drives the romanticization of border-crossing and the construction of the border itself? And how does affect tie in to larger social and economic structures around us, to neoliberal and globalist and other world transformations, to the subjectivities of our time? These are the questions that inspired us to put together this volume.
As a collaboration between researchers and study abroad practitioners with diverse expertise—cultural anthropology, geography, education, foreign language education, and psychoanalysis—this edited volume seeks to explore the romantic passions and related affect of border crossing in the context of study abroad and volunteering abroad by students from American colleges and universities.
