Traveling Beyond Genre

Abstract

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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“…In so doing, the series all question and critique a variety of elements of American and allied foreign policy. This creates and illustrates complexity in the 'narrative,' here meaning the socio-political, historical, contemporary and hegemonic positions of the various places and groups (see Henry, 2017). This not only makes the series distinct from the oft-essentialising travel genre but also fulfils the ethical requirements of a documentary to 'accurately' represent its subjects (and, in so doing, protect them from harm) and the contemporary TV requirement of narrative complexity.…”

“…This reductiveness and symbolic violence operate in direct opposition to the ethical requirements of documentary to, as discussed above, avoid and prevent harm to the subjects. By contrast, Henry (2017) writes a short but positive review of the PU episodes in Africa that had aired to that point. He argues that the series ‘successfully addresses many of the problems of representation tied to the [travel] genre’ through showing Africa as varied, giving contextualisation of history and contemporary global hegemony (Henry, 2017: 515).…”

“…By contrast, Henry (2017) writes a short but positive review of the PU episodes in Africa that had aired to that point. He argues that the series ‘successfully addresses many of the problems of representation tied to the [travel] genre’ through showing Africa as varied, giving contextualisation of history and contemporary global hegemony (Henry, 2017: 515). ‘Africans, to Bourdain, are problem solvers who negotiate the neo-colonial realities of globalization’ and the interviews done with people from a variety of social statuses are ‘more than set pieces; they provide critical assessments of their countries from varying positionalities.…”

“…‘Africans, to Bourdain, are problem solvers who negotiate the neo-colonial realities of globalization’ and the interviews done with people from a variety of social statuses are ‘more than set pieces; they provide critical assessments of their countries from varying positionalities. Africa is shown to have a complicated social present—a uniquely adapted modernity...’ (Henry, 2017: 516). Henry’s argument is borne out textually and paratextually (e.g., PU , 12:6, Woolever, 2021) in that both the texts and paratexts express concerns over the ethics of production and intentionally subvert many negative stereotypes of Africa as well as other places outside the Global North and/or West.…”

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“…This can contribute to a flattened representation, however, in addition to complementing Conway's (2013) paradox of saleable diversity, which he defines as 'the resulting erasure of difference in the name of diversity' (Conway, 2013: 30) in order to make such a text saleable or palatable to a wide audience. Such representations can, however, operate in opposition to negative stereotypes, for example, Henry (2017), who notes that reductivity and negativity is common in Western representations of Africa in travel and similar documentaries as well as in news coverage. One can perhaps connect this to Spivak's (1988) 'strategic essentialism', in which a postcolonial state or culture uses a somewhat monolithic representation of itself against a (former) coloniser's representation; that said, the series does present some nuance.…”