|
Articles Conference Reviews |
2008M5SmythThe Other Has a Passport, Too: Resisting Hegemonic Travel Discourse With Skybus going out of business on the weekend of the Cs, gas prices rising, the U.S. dollar falling, and no summer grant money to get me over to England and Ireland this year, I glumly entered a session on what is usually one of my favorite topics: travel writing. Lifting my feelings, though, was an outstanding group of panelists—Steve Bailey, Laurence Jose, Karyn Hollis, and Alex Ilyasova—who proposed and interrogated a whole series of measures to make travel writing less exploitative and more transformative. I came away from the session with numerous teaching and writing ideas, some of which I will be implementing enthusiastically this coming semester. I also recognized that I have little to feel sorry about; I like many other American academics still take for granted the “right” to travel without considering the cost to others. Steve Bailey, author of Strolling in Macau, laid the groundwork for the session in “(Re)positioning Reader Identities in Hong Kong Travel Guidebooks.” Using paradigms of technical communications to characterize popular travel books, Bailey points out that these books are a series of instructions on how to read the city, in this case Hong Kong, but their assumptions about reader identities are highly problematic. Like instruction manuals, travel guides such as Frommers, Rough Guide, Lonely Planet, and National Geographic rely upon a supposedly “neutral” user, but the identity of this user is heavily dependent upon dominant Western ideologies. The constructed reader is white, male, straight, able-bodied, English-speaking, and from a Western background. The guidebooks quarantine or erase certain identities and set up dichotomies between the neutral reader and identities positioned as Other. Thus, for gay and lesbian readers, most major travel guidebooks offer two or three paragraphs, focused exclusively on entertainment, with suggestions of where else to find more information (i.e., not in this neutral reader travel guide). This strategy of separation and containment, along with outright omission—National Geographic’s guide to Hong Kong makes no mention of gay and lesbian travelers, undercuts the possibility of creating an ethical dimension in the genre. Multiple identities are cast aside, erased by the sheen of whiteness painted over the text. All of the Hong Kong guidebooks, for example, warn travelers that they may be called “gweilo,” a Cantonese racial term for someone who is white, and the books note that visitors will stand out at night because of their color. These warnings, of course, make no sense for a traveler who is black or of Asian descent, for the guidebooks do not recognize travelers of color. In response to this troubling construction of reader identity, Bailey proposes a movement toward alternative guidebooks that are socially and ethically responsible, ones that unmask the ideologies that currently dominate the genre. Such alternative practices include recognizing multiple identities, highlighting ethical dimensions to travel (rather than focusing only on “objective” facts), teaching the readers how to de-naturalize dominant ideologies, and situating the writer and acknowledging his or her role in producing meaning. Laurence Jose explained how her students at Michigan Tech enacted these precepts by reversing the travel-writing perspective. Instead of identifying themselves as the consumers of another culture, these students, in an introductory technical communication course, used travel discourse to create guides for international students coming to their university for the first time. In “Writing for the Other: Composing Guidebooks for International Students in the Classroom”, Prof. Jose highlighted the positive outcomes of the following assignment for her students: “Michigan Tech, in its endeavor to sustain the enrollment of foreign students and to make its campus welcoming to international students, has contracted our firm to design a series of documents that would ease the cultural transition of international students.” The students worked in groups of three to produce a three- to four-page document on a specific topic for international students, such as driving in the U.S. In effect, they had to build a cultural bridge for newly arriving students, and the results proved beneficial for the writers and their intended audience (the writing center distributed some of these documents to international students). The designers of the pamphlets learned to foster a common ground; as they inquired about the culture of their audience, they had to examine their own culture and see it through the eyes of others. One group realized that the first thing they’d miss from home if they were coming to Michigan Tech from another country would be food. They created a pamphlet on international foods in the town, opening it with a regional voice: “So, you’re looking for a taste of home, eh?” The use of dialectical particle at the end of the sentence signaled to new students that they are in a specific region of the U. S., and that local cultures are not synonymous with national cultures. Ultimately, students learned that travel discourse is a heuristic that helps identify what remains invisible, and we should nurture the dynamic dimension of the borderland to create new learning spaces and to overcome the us-versus-them binary. Karyn Hollis also wants to get her students to rid themselves of the privileged gaze of American travelers. In “Beyond ‘It was Awesome,’ Writing the Realities of Travel,” she highlighted how students in her travel writing course at Villanova University learned the impact of their travels on others and how to be more responsible travel writers. The key to getting students to examine the ideology of travel (many assume it is a universal right and always beneficial to the country being visited) is through their growing interest in ecology and green politics. Professor Hollis allows students to see the celebratory nature of travel, especially through such texts as The Best American Travel Writing. Her course is divided by Spring Break, during which time the students visit various locales, forewarned that upon their return, they will look at the dark side of travel. At that point, readings shift to critiques of travel and tourism such as David Nicholson-Lord’s “The Politics of Travel” (The Nation, Oct. 6, 1997: 11-18), Jay Walljasper’s “Air Travel Is Killing the Planet” (Alternet, http://www.alternet.org/story/43095), Edward Said’s “Culture and Imperialism,” and Debbie Lisle’s The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006). With lots of empirical evidence available on, for example, how much greenhouse gas is produced by a plane flying overseas, students quickly realize there is a greater cost to their freedom to travel than they had realized. Students are also surprised about the cultural and economic effects of their tourism because they have accepted the idea that travel helps out the developing world; they find out that only 20% “trickles down” to the local economies, and that the commodification and trinketization of cultures reproduces the Other as an object of Western knowledge. In other words, American travelers assume the right to grow through their tourism without considering the effect of their consumption on those whom they visit. The response, informed by their readings of Debbie Lisle, is that travel writers can make a difference: They can make transparent the mechanics of travel writing in their articles and write themselves as subjects in formation in cooperation with a whole host of other peoples whom they encounter. Alex Ilyasova concluded the panel with a careful look at how the travel business constructs and represents gay and lesbian travelers. The travel business looks to groups that are perceived to have money and who can “Take Time Out to Travel,” so they follow stereotypes and target white, affluent, gay males (lesbian, bisexual, and transgender travelers are almost an afterthought) with a liberal, utilitarian economic approach—encouraging people to spend their money without considering the politics. Representation of gay and lesbian travelers is not simple for marketers, but they try to make it so anyway. They want to create a market in which gay and lesbian travelers are easily transformed into a certain kind of consumer behavior. To see this approach in action, look no further than popular travel websites, such as Orbitz or Travelocity. On the latter, Gay Travel is on a list, falling between California and Romance. Orbitz does slightly better in awareness of gay culture, acknowledging differences in destinations, for example. The repercussions of this business-driven approach to representation are mixed. There is some potential for consumer identification, which could ultimately lead to political change, but this kind of representation participates in the strategies of separation and containment (raised in Steve Bailey’s presentation at the beginning of this panel) and reduces gay and lesbian travel to money-making enterprises without consideration of history, culture, and politics. All four speakers on this panel thoughtfully and productively complicated the Western approach to travel and tourism, a fitting conclusion to a conference in a city that is relying on conventions like the Cs to restore itself. |