‘Repackaging’ empire: neo-colonial discourse of alternative travellers

Tourism is bound up in a web of power relationships. In this paper we analyse how the reproduction of global inequalities is relocated and manifested also in personal accounts of travel experiences that are deeply implicated into maintaining existing power relations between global centre and global periphery. We analysed testimonials of European tourists visiting African, Asian and Latin American villages, provided by Duara Travel alternative tourism platform, in order to demonstrate that the specificities of this kind of travelling, characterised primarily by anti-tourist ideology, are not immune to the ideologies that otherwise govern the tourism industry. Through representational conventions they employ while narrating their experience on global periphery, western travellers themselves routinely mobilize and circulate neo-colonial tropes: aestheticization, displays of servility, presumptions of dependency, and call for intervention with intention to help from position of domination. Analysed travel stories then reiterate familiar historical strategies for the production of (western) knowledge about the non-west countries and propose specific subject positions that produce the third world destinations discursively as particular type of (consume-able) objects. Keywords: orientalism, othering, anti-tourism, discourse, aestheticization, servility, white savior