After I posted about a current work-in-progress featuring backpackers in Europe, travel writer Bani Amor passed through this digital space. Over successive drafts of this manuscript I am wrestling with some of the same issues that Bani raises on her own blog, Everywhere All of the Time, in an interview with Cape Town-based poet and engineer Brian Kamanzi:

Bani:  You touched on the ‘marketing of place’, how we’re sold these concepts of places – Europe=culture, Africa=nature, etc. Travel writing has been and continues to be the way this marketing – branding, really – gets out to the masses. How do we disrupt that tradition? I’m very much a part of the movement trying to get more people of color to share their travel experiences, but how do we do so in a way that is not so colonialist as the genre generally is?

Brian’s response neatly outlines many of problems within the travel writing genre and everyone should read them here.