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AAWW TV: Tourism in Literature

Is it possible to write about travel while decolonizing the narrative?

By AAWW

Through our YouTube channel, AAWW TV, you can relive the magic of live events at our space in Chelsea, check out in-depth interviews with writers, and more. Every Thursday we’ll be sharing a new segment from AAWW TV on The Margins.

Travel writing is a genre rife with fantasies of escape, luxury, and finding oneself through an experience in an unfamiliar place—in other words, colonial tropes. Is it possible to write about travel while decolonizing the narrative? What can contemporary literature tell us about the relationship between tourists and service workers, and can it provide more authentic ways of knowing places that have been branded to Western tourists as pleasure zones? Join us for a reading with Canadian writer Farzana Doctor, who joins us for the US launch of All Inclusive, her book written from the perspective of a worker at a Mexican resort, queer travel writer and activist Bani Amor, writer and professor Tiphanie Yanique, whose debut novel, Land and Love of Drowning chronicles the changes in the US Virgin Islands over the 20th century and who recently wrote “Americans in a Battered Paradise” about the devastation of Hurricane Irma in The New York Times. They’re joined by Julia Hori, a graduate student who researches the colonial underpinnings of tourism in the Caribbean.

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