Pilgrimage is teleological travel that ascribes theological significance to a landscape. Pilgrimage can also function as a narrative structure for the collation of literary imaginations of distant locales. Pilgrimage narratives work in at least two directions: they record, often intertextually, the way in which the pilgrim understands a landscape or monument, while also encouraging the reader to imaginatively participate in the pilgrim’s reported experience. Intertextuality shapes what the pilgrim sees; how the pilgrim narrates their experience then determines how others see. Conceptually, pilgrimage serves as a structure and metaphor for the narration of geographic dislocation. 

Benedict Anderson and Brian Stock have established the ways in which communities and identities are formed through imagination and texts. Pilgrimage, as a liminal experience, shifts the identity of the traveler in perhaps unexpected ways while positioning them in relation to the visited places and cultures. The cross-cultural encounters inherent in pilgrimage necessitate new conceptualizations of otherness. The traveler’s perceptions of visited lands are filtered and expressed through their own prior engagements with stories and texts. The traveler then establishes their changing cultural identity through narrating their experiences to an imaginatively interpellated audience. Imagined pilgrimage negotiates between preexisting cultural and religious ideas and the lived experiences of travelers and readers.

This panel considers pilgrimage as an epistemological framework for the narration of identity and place. How do de-colonial, indigenous, and ecocritical approaches help us to understand pilgrimage narratives and their reception, both now and in the past? How do these texts ask their audiences to imagine pilgrimage in particular ways? In what ways are perceptions of place shaped by narrative or editorial practices? We particularly encourage transhistorical contributions, such as considerations of how ancient and medieval ideas of pilgrimage across cultures have persisted across time or informed epistemological engagements with place across centuries.