Reflections on Decolonising Travel Culture

Written by Ross Cameron, PhD School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Glasgow, and HASS Graduate School, University of Strathclyde. 

On Tuesday 19^th November 2019 Bani Amor, a queer travel writer who explores the continuities between settler colonialism and the modern day racialised, gendered and capitalistic cultures of travel and tourism, delivered their lecture ‘Wander/Lust: Navigating Consent in Travel Culture’ to the Strathclyde Feminist Research Network.

Queer travel writer Boni Amor

Covering a diverse range of subjects, from their personal experiences in the Ecuadorian tourist industry to attempts to decolonise travel that are currently taking place in Hawai’i and Harlem, Bani’s lecture ultimately posed the question as to whether consensual relationships between Western tourists and Indigenous peoples can ever be possible. Moreover, it also made me reflect on my own research, which examines British travel writing on Southeast Europe, and how my interest in travel writing came about. 

Bani’s talk began with a personal story that powerfully illustrated the continuities between contemporary tourism and settler colonialism driven by ideologies of white supremacy. Recalling working in Ecuador at a hotel built on the grounds (and in some cases out) of a dispossessed Incan fortress, they emphasised how indigenous land had been and continues to be occupied by uninvited foreign guests, whether that be the Spanish colonists who conquered the region or wealthy Western tourists seeking to consume a commodified and performative version of Indigenous culture. Bani also recalled their experiences of the racialised dynamics through which the tourism industry functions with Indigenous workers regularly going unpaid, working dangerously long shifts and being treated appallingly by Western tourists. In short, the ideology of white supremacy, which first served to justify the colonial conquest of the Americas, still very much retains its force with the native workforce treated as entirely expendable by Ecuador’s settler colonial elite and Western tourists alike. 

Following this reflection on Bani’s own experiences working within the unequal structures of tourism, the lecture moved towards a wide-ranging discussion that covered, amongst other issues, the gendered dynamics of modern tourism. Indigenous land and people, as Edward Said discusses in Orientalism (1978), [1] are gendered by colonial discourses as female and passive, ready to be occupied and taken possession of by the masculine West. Drawing on the orientalist theme, Bani illustrated that modern travel culture remains all too synchronous with hierarchical colonial relationship with locations as varied as Southeast Asia and Jamaica marketed as ‘anything goes destinations’ where Indigenous women are essentialised as submissive and sexualised objects ready to be used and abused by Western tourists. 

The final portion of the seminar focused on how and if travel culture can be decolonised. Citing the work of Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012), [2] Bani distanced themselves from the current vogue for using ‘decolonisation’ as a synonym for social justice campaigns and evidently envisages this process unmetaphorically; it is not just another name for ‘ethical’ or ‘sustainable’ travel but is instead a concrete path towards reshaping travel culture. For Bani, one path towards decolonisation can be found in the work of DeTours, a Hawai’i based project that aims to disrupt our typical paradisiacal image of the archipelago by organising tours that rightly present the islands as the site of military occupation and indigenous dispossession. In this way, guided tours – that ubiquitous sign of mass tourism – can paradoxically be useful for unsettling hegemonic colonial narratives. 

Another path towards decolonising travel culture is to question whether we want to be tourists in certain locations given who we are and where we come from, how close we correspond to what Audre Lorde called ‘the mythical norm’ of the wealthy heterosexual white male. [3] Indeed, do we really want to travel to places where the chasm of inequality between Indigenous peoples and ourselves is gaping, places where regardless our intentions we will inevitably become enmeshed in the global tourist industry’s racialised and gendered dynamics? Simply put, we need to ask if this really a price worth paying for a cheap cocktail on some faraway beach. 

Bani’s seminar, alongside an additional workshop held at Transmission Gallery, also made me reflect on my own research and how I became interested in travel writing in the first place. This registered most during the question and answer section when an audience member asked something along the lines of, ‘Are there any contemporary travel writers that you like?’ Bani’s answer: Anthony Bourdain, which was followed quickly by the qualification ‘he’s good but still not great’. My own interest in the academic study of travel writing developed, in no short measure, out of a prolonged fascination with Bourdain’s television programmes No Reservations (2005-12) and Parts Unknown (2013-18) that spanned from my mid-teenage years to my early-twenties. Indeed, I had always admired Bourdain himself, at first because his foul-mouthed Hunter S. Thompson persona appealed to a teenage boy and later because his criticism of American imperialism at home and abroad and his humanistic understanding of the world seemed to align pretty well with my own political views. However, Bani’s equivocation – ‘he’s good but still not great’ – made me revisit his work more critically and, given my academic research, there was no better place to start than his tour of Romania.

Anthony Bourdain by Henry Garfunkel. Source: Vanity Fair https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/06/anthony-bourdain-death-legacy-parts-unknown-best-episodes

The episode begins with a complete sense of obfuscation. Bourdain wants to film an introduction to the country in front of a statue of Vlad the Impaler in Bucharest and despite having the Romanian Government’s permission to film local officials for some unknown reason bar them from filming unless the abide by a set of labyrinthine rules. In the end, Bourdain, playing on the stereotype of endless Eastern Bloc bureaucracy, cannot penetrate the obfuscatory fog and gives up. 

Things go from bad to worse. Romania is described as having ‘a very long and complicated history’ (so there really is no point in learning it); the ‘foreboding’ landscape is inscribed with ‘terror’; ‘strange and disorientating mists’ blanket the forests; the cars have a ‘strangely unbalanced structure and tiny wheels’; and they visit a ‘gore soaked slaughterhouse’ deep in Transylvania. Of course, there are also countless obligatory shots of stray dogs, horse and carts, desolate muddy villages and rusty trains with Romania’s poverty, then, forming a running joke between the ever-ironic Bourdain and the Western viewer. [4] In the space of a short travel documentary Bourdain hits all the registers of a particularly Gothic strain of ‘balkanism’, a colonial discourse identified by Maria Todorova in Imagining the Balkans (1997) that constructs Southeast Europe as backwards, obfuscated, irrational, violent and hyper-masculine in opposition to the progressive, rational, civil and masculine West.[5]

Revisiting Bourdain’s television programmes in the wake of Bani’s seminar was an eye-opener. Since studying travel writing academically I had come to be aware of the problematic manner in which the mode of writing’s development in the modern period has been inextricably linked with the growth of Western colonial projects across the globe but I had always placed Bourdain beyond the realm of criticism, perhaps because of a nostalgic attachment to his work and an admiration of his politics. Let me be clear, Bourdain’s travel writing is still, as Bani suggested, much better than most of his peers. His documentaries have covered locations across the globe that have seen the worst of neo-colonialism and neo-liberalism and they often give voice to marginalised communities and recognise the central role played by women in cultural reproduction. However, the picture he forms of Romania bears a striking similarity to those produced by less avowedly anti-imperialist travel writers whose images of Southeast European backwardness, barbarism and obfuscation serve to discursively underpin the region’s close supervision by the West through, in the contemporary context, the EU, the IMF and NATO. 

Unfortunately, Bourdain’s excursion to Romania illustrates that no travel writer is beyond the dynamics of colonial discourses that underpin both Western imperialism and modern tourism. It also suggests, to me, that an avowedly anti-imperialist documentarian like Bourdain is more likely to engage in othering foreign cultures when they are located within the geographical bounds of Europe, where his denigration can be brushed aside as ironic humour instead of being understood as emanating from the same Eurocentric ideologies that undergird colonialism. 

That travel writers, even the best intentioned of them, cannot but support Western hegemony may seem like a pessimistic conclusion. However, perhaps if West European and North American travellers took into account Bani’s pathways to decolonising travel culture next time they boarded a flight to some faraway destination they may be able to represent foreign cultures on their own terms and understand that the very real social and cultural problems they encounter are not the result of essentialised characteristics in the Indigenous peoples but rather stem from centuries of extractive and exploitative European colonial practices. 

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[1] Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978).

[2] Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society, 1:1 (2012), pp. 1-40.

[3] Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Berkley: Crossing Press, 1984), p. 116.

[4] ‘Romania’, Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, Travel Channel (originally aired 25 Feb., 2008) <https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6llimn> [accessed 20:11:19].

[5] Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).