Travelling optics in Yoko Tawada

This paper pays attention to travelling in Tawada's work and to optics and the mechanics of sight. Tawada's characters are obsessed by travel and anxiety-ridden by questions related to movement. Passports and other identity documents are the predominant means to focus the issues of travel at borders in her work. But travelers in these works cross not just nations but media. Thus, this paper pays attention to more than the movement from Vietnam to France, but also to the travel from text to picture, from written to taken (as in photograph). In the process, it explores the intimate relationships these characters have with cameras as they traverse the border separating body and machine.