Racialized leisure makes the traveler a spectacular sight rather than a spectator

Evidence

James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village” may seem an unlikely text to enfold into an analysis of game reserves, racialized tourism, and environmental time. Yet in light of the discussion of Kleinhans and Ndebele, we can glean from Baldwin’s classic essay productive insights into racialized ecologies of looking and the role that cultures of nature play in modernity’s civilizational power plays. Some forty years before Ndebele arrived as a solitary, improbable novelty at the game lodge gates, Baldwin spent the first of several sojourns in a Swiss Alpine village that he portrayed as a “white wilderness.” He had been forewarned that “he would probably be a ‘sight’ for the village,” and his essay offers a far-reaching meditation on invisible visibility, on how it feels—and what it means culturally—to be a “sight” unseen. Baldwin, like Ndebele after him, is thrust by the stresses of racialized leisure into a state of spectacular self-consciousness. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 531

Categorization

• XREF: Bridges the polyad’s ‘ecologies of looking’ and double-consciousness themes to the writer-activist translation role of chapter 5. — connects to: Multiculturalism reduces difference to exotic spectacle while evading racism — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 245; Spectators actively co-constitute the spectacle in their daily lives rather than passively receiving it — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living With…, 194; Airports allocate the privilege of unexamined travel along racialized lines (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Multiculturalism reduces difference to exotic spectacle while evading racism #expands (0.82) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 245
• Spectators actively co-constitute the spectacle in their daily lives rather than passively receiving it #responds-to (0.78) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 194
• Airports allocate the privilege of unexamined travel along racialized lines #complicates (0.75)
• Tourism operators substitute globally recognizable ethnicity for local authenticity. #expands (0.75) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 1206
• Racial habits conceal racial inequality in plain sight until a spectacle forces reckoning #expands (0.72) — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 189