Reversible objects: Elizabeth Bishop’s postcards and the interstitial imagination of travel

Elizabeth Bishop’s postcards offer a material record of how travel can be represented when physical location, pictured place, relational attachment and public legibility do not fully coincide. Drawing on a selected corpus from the Bishop postcard archive at Vassar College, this article develops the concept of the interstitial imagination of travel to describe representational work generated under such conditions. The concept concerns not non-coincidence in itself, but structured non-coincidence under unequal conditions of public legibility. Close readings show how ordinary tourism vocabulary can compress politically and socially dense conditions of mobility; how arrival, dwelling, recognition and belonging remain analytically distinct even when a traveller has established a durable life in a place; and how postcard signs may remain publicly available while acquiring relational force that is unevenly accessible to different readers. These relations become observable because received images, inscription, correction, emphasis and address remain materially associated within particular objects. Bishop’s practice therefore does not establish the postcard as an exceptional medium or a simple counter-discourse to tourist representation. It shows how agency works on already circulating representations of place, and how travel may culminate in arrival without resolving how belonging can be represented or publicly recognised.