Decolonization and Travel Culture With Bani Amor

In this four-part lecture series, we’ll take an in-depth look into the evolution of travel culture in the West as essential to the colonial project and how decolonial disruptions of said culture actually tap into its revolutionary power.

Where do decolonization movements and travel culture meet? If we decenter whiteness and leisure from “travel” and instead interpret it as a vehicle to explore the practice of movement⁠—how we got here, where we’re at now, and where we might go⁠ (or where we shouldn’t)—it could show us what role it can play in both dominating and dismantling oppressive power structures. There will be an emphasis on how participants’ respective ancestries have shaped our relationships to place and our positionality in hierarchies. But mostly, we’ll study the not-so-hidden agendas of the master travel narrator, the link between human zoos and travel media, an how the tradition of internationalist solidarity shows how travel culture is actually essential to the movement toward decolonization.

This is a class for folks of all walks of life, though it may be more accessible to those who have at least a basic grasp of social justice.