Anthill and other Essentializing Ideologies

On April 2, 2010, All Things Considered (NPR) interviewed E.O. Wilson, distinguished Harvard biologist, who was promoting his first novel, Anthill. During the interview, Robert Siegel asks, “Is your fascination with ants today just a direct continuation of the little kid digging in the sand and looking at these creatures?” Wilson responds,

Oh, yes, it is. Every kid has a bug period. I just never grew out of mine.

But basically, I'd like people to strike some kind of a balance in between

the poor urban kid that never knows what's going on in the real world

outside of his computer and TV screen…We really need to have our

kids getting out long enough for them to develop a deep interest in and

perhaps love for the wild lands remaining to us.

Wilson asserts that “urban” kids never truly know the “real world outside of his computer and TV screen.” Although his intent is perhaps to underscore the need for youth to explore and engage nature, he ultimately essentializes urban youth as passive voyeurs of media. By asserting that “every kid has a bug period,” he homogenizes all children into his ideological view of childhood. He further negates their agency, subversive political potential to create and even their very lives as “real.” Wilson’s “real” is a skewed “balance” which favors his privileged-professorial-biological-ideology of nature as ultimately authentic. More importantly, he ties this realness to travel – “getting out long enough.” Ideologically, he engages the very politics of destination Habell-Pallán engages in Loca Motion: The Travels of Chicana and Latina Popular Culture. For Wilson and his novel, there are no apparent alternatives to the real other than by “nature.” Habell-Pallán acknowledges the point of origin of the artists she discusses but affirms that “these artists are much more focused on a politics of destination” (p.4). According to Habell-Pallán, urban youth (specifically Chicana/Latina) are inventing alternative routes, constructing alternative worlds, using alternative circuits and creating alternative forms of travel.

QUESTION: How does Habell-Pallán’s book engage travel as an ideological discourse which engages James Clifford, Paul Gilroy and others who have theorized journey/diaspora as academic discourses of displacement, construction, rejection, replacement and marginality?