Whose Journey? On the Travel Writing of Displacement

Travel—and the writing that seeks to capture it—is inherently generative. Travelers use movement through space to explore personal identity and social norms. Then, by organizing those explorations into cohesive stories, travelers deepen the transformational moment, hone its meaning, and weave personal insights into social conversations about what it means to exist and belong.

Constructing these narratives is an act of power, and, as with any act of power, not all stories make it onto the page. Historically, the genre of travel writing has favored the privileged. It popularized journeys taken for personal edification or even self-indulgence, while leaving the experiences of migrant workers, domestic servants, and war refugees in the shadows. It celebrated dramatic, once-in-a-lifetime adventures to far-flung and supposedly primitive places, while the life-changing significance of modest trips to closer-to-home destinations was left unremarked.

The freedom to roam has likewise been unevenly distributed, with men and young adults encouraged to spread their wings while women, mothers, and elders were urged to remain home, receive protection, and provide care. These biases—many of which persist today—quietly narrowed the genre, pre-emptively discounting many travelers and their stories.

Regardless of distance, stories of invisible exile expose the spatial processes of exclusion, as well as the journeys undertaken in search of new belonging.

But the digital age has democratized the travel writing genre. Blogs, tweets, and podcasts bypass traditional gatekeepers, bringing a wider array of voices into literary spaces that once seemed impenetrable. Here, travelers of all backgrounds—some privileged, some precarious—document the interplay between spatial movement and personal growth, collectively redrawing the boundaries of the genre.

Commercial publishing has likewise diversified. Narratives by Black and Brown writers, stories shaped by queerness, and accounts informed by feminist critique now regularly find a place on bookstore shelves.

Memoir, in particular, has blossomed in this regard, becoming a vessel for perspectives that were previously overlooked: voices of dissent, stories from the margins, accounts of atrocity and overcoming. Memoir creates space to explore the nuances of what it means to be human, as well as what it means to experience change. At its heart, memoir is about epiphanies—those remembered flashes that alter the trajectory of a life, moments of crisis that force people to take stock of their experience, and events after which nothing feels quite the same.

Memoir becomes travel writing when movement through space is central to how the story unfolds. Authors use vivid descriptions of the places that forge them to map the connections between where they are in the world and who they might become. Place in memoir is not simply a backdrop; it is the ground to be embraced, escaped, altered, or reckoned with during the process of personal growth.

Even when memoir isn’t explicitly pitched as travel writing—when it avoids the tropes of the epic journey or the exotic locale—many of these works still grapple with themes of space and mobility. Time and again, memoirists reveal how movement—crossing borders, traversing cities, changing addresses—was fundamental to the process of reinventing their identities and their life circumstances. Just as often, they expose the barriers that block these metamorphoses, and they highlight the costs of remaining stuck. This deep engagement with place, identity, and transformation invites readers to reconsider what counts as travel—and whose voices deserve to be heard.

One archetype emerging from these narratives is the theme of invisible exile. Exile is a state of being barred from a homeland—of being forced to live in a foreign world as punishment for not conforming. Exile is what the ex-Hasid experiences when, in response to her secular beliefs, she is expelled from her ultra-Orthodox community and thrown into a new environment that speaks in a different language, uses a different currency, and endorses a different worldview. Exile is what the domestic violence survivor experiences when she must hide—changing jobs, homes, friends, even her name, if not her country—in the quest to keep herself safe. Exile is what the transgender teen experiences when fleeing the hostile homophobic heartland to seek shelter and acceptance in the coastal big cities.

The history of US racial passing offers yet another perspective: African Americans integrating into white communities often had no choice but to sever connections with their families and heritage, forging new lives in a world that made it impossible to ever safely return.

Reading this history shines a light on the difference between exile and passing. Passing among strangers in a public space is temporary and keeps community ties intact. Exile, in contrast, is indefinite—marked by a lasting break with prior identities and a durable forsaking of belonging. The issue isn’t that people show different faces in different places; it’s that society, whether the original community or the new one, disavows dual citizenship.

The pressure to keep exile concealed—to keep it invisible—mounts when disclosing the reasons motivating the journey would put travelers at risk. The social borders that demarcate race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, ability, and trauma are not easily crossed, and those who attempt the journey may face retribution: loss of identity, estrangement from heritage, and exclusion from the environments that once offered support.

Travel—and the act of writing about it—has always been generative, even if not everyone has been permitted to speak.

Finding invisible exiles in travel writing is not easy. Some are migrants, carrying passport stamps or refugee status, but crossing international borders is incidental to—rather than definitive of—what invisible exile means. Invisible exile encompasses people escaping religious cults, those made homeless through eviction, or other travelers who, for various reasons, find themselves severed from their roots and thrust into strange new worlds—sometimes mere blocks from the places where they once lived. It includes self-exiled pilgrims setting out on nomadic quests to heal from homophobia, abuse, or rape. It describes people who relocate to shed inaccurate gender assignments or escape ableist stigmatization. Some are born into exile—born poor, born Black—and preemptively excluded from broader social belonging. Others are adopted into privileged spaces, only to remain marked as Other, inhabiting shared environments without ever receiving full acceptance.

Some invisible exile journeys span thousands of miles, while others lead only to the other side of town—a seemingly short distance that can nevertheless carry profound social significance. Regardless of distance, stories of invisible exile expose the spatial processes of exclusion, as well as the journeys undertaken in search of new belonging. These stories reveal how movement, both literal and metaphorical, can propel the ongoing work of self-actualization.

The outcomes of these journeys are mixed. Those fortunate enough to receive publishing contracts generally acknowledge significant gains in personal insight, emotional relief, or access to social and economic opportunities. But even those fortunate few pay a steep price. Invisible exiles lose families—parents, siblings, partners, children—and endure social ostracism. They may be cut off from financial resources, disowned, or stripped of personal property and communal safety nets. Their identities may fracture, with heritage revoked and personal narratives disrupted. They also lose access to the places that once anchored and sustained them, the environments suffused with the customs, memories, and rhythms that forged them.

These losses help explain why so many invisible exiles do not survive. Some turn to suicide, succumb to addiction, or become easy targets for those who exploit vulnerability. For others, even as life continues relatively intact, the experience carries the weight of existential death. The selves they left behind are gone forever, and the road ahead must be faced as someone entirely new.

Traditional travel writing—which has historically normalized the types of journeys that society rewards, rather than the ones considered taboo—is ill-equipped to make sense of these losses. This shortcoming must be rectified. Focusing only on what travelers gain silences the pain and trauma of forced dislocation, and offers no critique of societies that strip away belonging as punishment for not conforming. Focusing only on gains also says nothing about the nature of the journeys taken, the process travelers use to convert furtive motion into self-reinvention, and the places that assist or block these quests.

Yet, by attending to these formerly hidden stories now coming to light, we can begin to draw a more complete map of human movement and the identities and power structures it sustains—or disrupts. Calling attention to the archetype of invisible exile—giving it a name and charting its path—opens our eyes to the ever-evolving shades of grey linking travel and belonging. By tracing such journeys, we encounter not only those cast out or forced to wander, but also the worlds they enter, the forces that label their movements as unspeakable or strange, and the spatial strategies that empower choice and agency even in the context of devastating losses.

Telling these stories, even if only quietly, can put these journeys—and the voices that tell them—back on the map. Invisible exile has always exited. Travel—and the act of writing about it—has always been generative, even if not everyone has been permitted to speak. It’s time to bring more stories to light.

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Adapted from Invisible Exile: The Travel Writing of Displacement by Kimberley Kinder. Published by the University of Minnesota Press. Copyright © 2025 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. This excerpt appears courtesy of the author and the publisher.