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If you have been in an airport or waiting room in the last four years, you may have noticed an interruption to Cable News Network's 24-hour news cycle. Instead of news programming, per se, you can watch the irreverent and provocative chef, Anthony Bourdain, eating, drinking, and chatting his way through (primarily peripheral) countries. Bourdain (2000) is known for his no-nonsense, exposé approach to institutions, politics, and food. Travel shows typically avoid overly complex political commentary or historicized accounts of localities (Fürsich 2002). The genre has the potential to challenge patronizing dichotomies of exotically other places constructed in "Western" imaginaries (Mathers 2010; Said 2003) but often falls short of realizing this ideal. Instead, locations are suspended from their sociopolitical milieu, locals are used as voiceless set pieces, and exotic lands are presented as fundamentally other (Fürsich 2002). Parts Unknown is clearly a travel show; however, I will argueusing five episodes from Central, Southern, and East Africa as evidence (ep. 1:8; ep. 2:6; ep. 4:5; ep. 5:4; ep. 6:5)-that it successfully addresses many of the problems of representation tied to the genre. The concept of Africa-specifically sub-Saharan/black/tropical Africa-as an entity, while not anthropologically correct, is worthy of examination as it pervades public discourse (Ferguson 2006). Conceptually, Africa is imagined as the antithesis to the West, often presented as a place devoid of modernity and civilization, a primordial frontier where sensible animals share space with hopeless people (Echtner and Prasad 2003; Mathers 2004; Mostafanezhad 2013). Consider images of Africa: There is the smiling African child, depoliticized and stripped of agency (Manzo 2008), the leisurely gorilla and the wilderness surrounding it (Gahutu 2016), and traditional kings and customs that allow a journey in Africa to seem

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