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If you search “#travelnoire” on Instagram, your search will yield approximately 1.4 million photos of Black travelers leisurely exploring various international destinations. The hashtag takes its name from the digital publishing platform Travel Noire that features content for and about Black travelers. Zim Ugochukwu, founder of Travel Noire, cites a dearth of representations of Black travelers in mainstream travel discourses as her inspiration to create “something special and beautiful for people of color” that would ultimately become the popular, digital platform (qtd. in Pointdujour 2014, 1). The emergence and popularity of Black travel blogs like Travel Noire and NoMadness, and their accompanying hashtags and social media pages, reinvigorates attention to the politics of Black leisure travel. In the context of historic and ongoing exclusion of Black travelers from mainstream leisure travel discourse, specifically, coupled with the persistence of racial profiling, surveillance, and policing of Black mobility more generally, many Black American travelers who contribute to the blog and use these hashtags view their participation in Black leisure travel as a resistive and reparative practice against anti-Black racism. However, this posturing celebrates the accomplishment and performance of a Black cosmopolitan identity without a critical discussion of whose immobility and whose containment often make Black American leisure travel possible. How might we, as instructors, use Black feminist thought and theory—narrative forms, stories, and play with language (Christian 1987, 52)—to disrupt neoliberal narratives of exceptional, Black (American) travel that, at times, uncritically celebrate Black mobilities that reify colonial and neocolonial ways of engaging leisure travel? In this essay, I will detail how I use June Jordan’s classic essay “Report from the Bahamas” (2003), alongside additional Black feminist theorists and Black women’s visual cultures, to expose neocolonial values that underpin various iterations of Black leisure travel. I will also detail an assignment wherein I ask students to create tourism advertisements, based off of Jordan’s essay, in an attempt to untether Black leisure travel, and Black mobility broadly, from discourses of exceptionalism and neocolonialism.
A Classic Text for the Contemporary Moment
For the past three years, I have taught various iterations of a course I call “Traveling while Black.” With a specific focus on African American and Afro-Caribbean literature, the course explores travel writing as a genre—its conventions,...