Documenting the American Student Abroad: The Media Cultures of International Education

By Kelly Hankin

1 in 10 undergraduates in the US will study abroad. Extoled by students as personally transformative and celebrated in academia for fostering cross-cultural understanding, study abroad is also promoted by the US government as a form of cultural diplomacy and a bridge to future participation in the global marketplace.

In Documenting the American Student Abroad, Kelly Hankin explores the documentary media cultures that shape these beliefs, drawing our attention to the broad range of stakeholders and documentary modes involved in defining the core values and practices of study abroad. From study abroad video contests and a F.B.I. produced docudrama about student espionage to reality television inspired educational documentaries and docudramas about Amanda Knox, Hankin shows how the institutional values of "global citizenship," "intercultural communication," and "cultural immersion" emerge in contradictory ways through their representation.

By bringing study abroad and media studies into conversation with one another, Documenting the American Student Abroad: The Media Cultures of International Education offers a much needed humanist contribution to the field of international education, as well as a unique approach to the growing scholarship on the intersection of media and institutions. As study abroad practitioners and students increase their engagement with moving images and digital environments, the insights of media scholars are essential for helping the field understand how the mediation of study abroad rhetoric shapes rather than reflects the field's central institutional ideals

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Jan 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781978807709

Book preview

DOCUMENTING THE AMERICAN STUDENT ABROAD

DOCUMENTING THE AMERICAN STUDENT ABROAD

The Media Cultures of International Education

KELLY HANKIN

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hankin, Kelly, author.

Title: Documenting the American student abroad : the media cultures of international education / Kelly Hankin.

Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020010751 | ISBN 9781978807686 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978807693 (cloth) | ISBN 9781978807709 (epub) | ISBN 9781978807716 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978807723 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH:Foreign study—Social aspects. | International education—Social aspects. | Mass media and education—United States. | Mass media—United States—Influence. | Education and globalization.

Classification: LCC LB2375 .H365 2021 | DDC 370.116—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020010751

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2021 by Kelly Hankin

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

To Simon Barker, travel guide extraordinaire

CONTENTS

Introduction: The Media Cultures of Study Abroad

1 The Personal Is Professional: First-Person Travelogues and the Study Abroad Video Contest

2 Intercultural Communication among Intimate Strangers: Reality Television and Documentary Study Abroad

3 House Hunters International: Homestay Movies in the Digital Era

4 Study Abroad’s Diversity Problem: Vlogs as Necessary Media

5 Spy Kids: The Consequences of Global Citizenship in Game of Pawns

6 Study Abroad and the Female Traveler in the Amanda Knoxudramas

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

DOCUMENTING THE AMERICAN STUDENT ABROAD

INTRODUCTION

The Media Cultures of Study Abroad

As an undergraduate attending a large public university in the late 1980s, I had little awareness of study abroad. Though my university probably had a study abroad office, nobody I knew ever used it. If there were promotional brochures and fliers about study abroad options, I certainly didn’t register them. Leaving the country to attend college abroad seemed about as likely as traveling to the moon. What little I knew about study abroad came from a series of instructional videos regularly screened in my French class. Each week, I would eagerly anticipate viewing an episode of French in Action, an educational video–cum–romantic comedy in fifty-two installments. Developed in 1987 by a Yale professor and funded by the Annenberg Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, French in Action taught the French language through the story of Robert, a young American man studying abroad in France, and Mireille, his French love interest. While I don’t recall much about either Robert’s study abroad experience or his romantic escapades with Mireille, I vividly remember the way Mireille was overtly sexualized by the camera, which slowly lingered over the contours of her breasts and legs. As this was before my feminist awakening, I confess I was titillated rather than outraged. But over at Yale, the French language students weren’t putting up with it; in 1990 they filed a sexual harassment grievance with the university claiming French in Action’s sexism interfered with their successful learning.¹

Today, at the private liberal arts university where I teach, students would be hard-pressed not to know about study abroad. Like many American liberal arts universities, the University of Redlands extols the virtues of study abroad and provides numerous opportunities for students to travel as part of their education. Moreover, my students exist in a radically different media landscape than I did as an undergraduate, before the widespread adoption of the internet. In contrast to my experience, they have an extensive array of visual resources about study abroad at their fingertips. No longer relegated to undetected promotional fliers or sexist educational videos, media about study abroad now comes in a range of forms, from film and television to digital video and vlogs, and circulates widely in the public sphere.² This media is produced by a broad range of stakeholders, shaped through a wide variety of documentary modes, and screened in radically diverse contexts, from institutional conferences to foreign bedrooms. Documenting the American Student Abroad: The Media Cultures of International Education is about this new media culture and how it both shapes and reveals contemporary understandings of the value and practice of study abroad.

As this media culture serves to advance the values and mission of the study abroad industry, I argue that it functions as a useful cinema, what Haidee Wasson and Charles R. Acland describe as films that are harnessed by institutions and their agents to "satisfy organizational demands and objectives, that is, to do something in particular."³ According to Wasson and Acland, useful cinema first and foremost serves or responds to institutional ideologies and practices. Though it occasionally may be entertaining and well crafted, the goal of useful cinema is less about advancing the art of cinema or entertaining audiences than it is about the maintenance and longevity of institutions seemingly unrelated to cinema.⁴ The history of film is filled with such practices. Over the course of the moving image’s existence, it has had many official, informal, and shadow collaborators across a range of industries, institutions, and practices. Film and media scholars have unearthed cinema’s rich partnerships with transportation and tourism, public health, medicine, K–12 education, human resources and employee training, government agencies, the military, philanthropic organizations, community activism, and civic and religious institutions.⁵

To understand useful cinema and the institutional facets of cultural life, Wasson and Acland argue for the necessity of situating it within the intersection of film form, audiovisual technologies, and … institutional mandates and spaces.⁶ My own analysis of study abroad media cultures is particularly indebted to this concept. I understand study abroad and media as partners in the creation of a useful media that is produced at the intersection of study abroad institutions and their agents, discourses and orthodoxies around international education, economic exigencies and strategies, technologies and ideologies of vision, mediated travel and touristic practices, and media histories and practices. Together, these disparate and often ideologically incompatible components form the tapestry of study abroad media culture. This is a media culture that serves or responds to the institutions, ideologies, and practices of study abroad rather than primarily those of entertainment.

What is the media culture of study abroad? It is first and foremost media that is produced by stakeholders in the practice of international education. Managerial theory defines stakeholders as groups and individuals who can affect (or be affected by) an organization.⁷ Given the expansiveness of this definition, stakeholders are a heterogeneous and ever-shifting group, ranging from people who financially benefit from organizations to people interested and enmeshed in its ideals and pursuits. This can include everyone from shareholders, employees, and customers to competitors, experts, and policymakers.⁸ While this heterogeneity means that stakeholders do not always agree on organizational practices and goals, they all share an investment in their outcome. Study abroad media, then, is media produced by the groups and individuals invested in the practices and values of study abroad. This includes program vendors, thought leaders, students, parents, the U.S. government, and the concerned public.

Thus, study abroad media does not typically include commercial narratives about Americans studying abroad. While they may contribute to cultural understandings of study abroad, their stakeholder relationship to the institution of study abroad is arguably minor, neither overtly concerned with nor speaking to its mission. Commercial representations of American students abroad often showcase engagement with foreign cultures in ways that are fundamentally at odds with the official values, practice, and messaging of study abroad, which typically revolve around the concepts of cultural immersion, meaningful intercultural communication, and global citizenship. Instead, as commercial representations of Americans studying abroad are most often situated within coming-of-age comedies or horror/thriller films, intercultural contact is generally framed by chaos, sexual desire, or fear. Therefore, the institutional values central to study abroad are more often upended than advanced. For example, in coming-of-age comedies such as Take Her, She’s Mine (Henry Koster, 1963), Winning London (Craig Shapiro, 2001), and Eurotrip (Jeff Schaffer and Alec Berg, 2004), cultural immersion is often reduced to either romantic or humorously chaotic mise-en-scène that enables cultural difference to serve as a colorful and quirky backdrop to stories of personal adventure. In these films, intercultural communication typically amplifies stereotypes, cultural immersion most often leads to trouble, and global competence generally involves comedic capers that wreak havoc on foreign soil. In turn, in horror films and thrillers, such as Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977; Luca Guadagnino, 2018), Fright Night II: New Blood (Eduardo Rodriguez, 2013), and Hostel I and II (Eli Roth, 2005, 2007), cultural immersion and intercultural communication put students in physical and psychological peril, creating fear of rather than empathy for cultural difference. To be sure, these conventions don’t make commercial narratives about study abroad any less culturally significant, their interpretative possibilities any less generative, or their relationship to study abroad any less instructive to students. But as they don’t overtly serve or respond to the institutional mission and tenets of study abroad, commercial narratives—with one exception—exist outside the book’s framework of study abroad’s useful cinema. Indeed, the narrative films those in the study abroad community most often recommend for predeparture students typically do not include films featuring Americans students abroad.⁹ Thus, save one exception I discuss later in the introduction, for study abroad’s media cultures, this book primarily looks elsewhere.

As is the case with most useful cinema, study abroad media exists primarily in the realm of nonfiction media. Because this is a broad, fuzzy, and ever-expanding category, study abroad media culture includes everything from traditionally indexed long-form documentary to vlogs on YouTube that run less than three minutes. This diverse media is likewise animated by a wide range of stakeholders who work in dramatically different production contexts, from students creating videos during study abroad trips to the U.S. government producing films in professional studios. Yet, as I will show, despite its many faces and practices, the vast majority of study abroad media, including forms specific to the digital age, draw on well-worn documentary genres, rhetoric, and tropes, from travelogues, autobiographical films, and home movies to reality television and docudramas. One of the book’s central contentions, then, is that the documentary modes that compose study abroad media cultures also profoundly shape their institutional messages. Chapters explore—to a greater or lesser degree—the interaction between study abroad rhetoric and specific documentary modes, demonstrating how the latter informs, rather than merely reveals, the former. In pursuing this line of inquiry, Documenting the American Student Abroad does not seek to make claims about the ontological status of documentary; chapters neither pursue precise categorical definitions of documentary nor reject claims to them on specific grounds. Instead, I agree with those scholars who recognize the fuzziness, fluidity, and widening of documentary’s borders and the relevance of the relationship among form, reality, and viewer for categorical definitions.¹⁰ Instead of focusing on the ontological status of documentary, Documenting the American Student Abroad explores its many faces and practices—from the well known to the newly emerging, the sanctioned to the contested—in order to highlight what happens when these styles and practices intersect with institutional agendas.

Accordingly, while I pull from a range of multidisciplinary sources to build my arguments, one of the main guides for the book’s assertions is the wide-ranging field of documentary studies, particularly the research and insights of scholars working on the ideological functions of old and new documentary forms. While not all the scholars I draw on identify as documentary scholars nor likely share the same definition of documentary, all have greatly contributed to the understanding of the broad range of historical and contemporary media operating under this sign. Their rich work on how the conventions and tropes of documentary shape meaning, ideologically embed themselves in cultural artifacts, migrate across cultural forms, and generate new meanings in different contexts is what enabled this book to take shape. A more detailed explanation of how I draw on documentary scholarship appears in my chapter breakdown at the end of this introduction.

By focusing on the media cultures of study abroad, Documenting the American Student Abroad also contributes to the growing scholarship on the ongoing intertwining of travel, tourism, and the moving image. Thus, the second guide for this book is the rich historical and theoretical work on this symbiotic relationship. As it points to the central role of media in travel practices and identities, as well as demonstrates the persistence of time-honored travel tropes in contemporary media, this scholarship provides the conceptual backbone for the book’s overarching claim that media and study abroad are mutually informing practices. It is to the insights of this scholarship that I now turn.

MEDIATED TRAVEL

In 2016, at the age of forty-six, I went on my first official study abroad, albeit this time as a teacher to a group of American undergraduates in Salzburg, Austria. Shortly before classes began, the students and I traveled via bus through Italy, briefly touring some of the country’s most visited sites. Not long after I had met the students, some of the young women informed me that I reminded them of Angela Ungermeyer (Alex Borstein), the strict and acerbic high school principal who chaperones Lizzie and her friends on a school trip to Rome in the teen comedy-cum-travelogue The Lizzie McGuire Movie (Jim Fall, 2003). These students continued to reference the movie throughout the two months I was with them, revealing the significant impression it made before their European travel. That they saw themselves as some version of the film’s students was clear, especially since the parallels between their experience and the visual representation were at least superficially apparent. Though they were older than the students in the movie—Lizzie and gang are just entering high school—my students were likewise on a bus trip to Italy, chaperoned by several adults, and guided by rules they often ignored. They also designed their own travel experiences and memories according to Lizzie and her cohorts, making sure, for example, to visit and take pictures in front of Rome’s Trevi Fountain just as they did. The Lizzie McGuire Movie thus offered my students a reference for what European study abroad looks like, provided a blueprint for their own travels, and provided a lens through which they could view their own experience.

This experience of travel mediated through cinematic representation is neither unique to my students nor revelatory in academic scholarship. It is by now well established by media scholars that cinema is, as Jeffrey Ruoff calls it, a machine for travel.¹¹ As they emerged in the same historical moment, moving image technology and mass tourism were mutually dependent industries.¹² As numerous film historians have shown, the very genre dedicated to travel—the travelogue—was central to the birth, development, and success of the new medium of moving pictures.¹³ Travelogues were one of the most common genres of early cinema, not only exhibited widely across the globe but also serving to visually define and popularize its many landscapes.¹⁴ These silent cinema travelogues built on a rich tradition of pre-cinematic forms of visual travel from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—notably illustrated travel lectures, 360-degree panoramas, and horizontally scrolling dioramas—that oriented viewers to seeing the world through images.¹⁵

Film historians point to a number of reasons for this mutual dependence. Historically, transportation and film industries relied on each other for their growth and financial success. At the turn of the century, in order to promote their itineraries and the habit of tourism, railway companies often financed cinema travelogues.¹⁶ The mutually beneficial relationship between film and travel industries expanded throughout the twentieth century. Just as the newly developed railroad industry harnessed the power of the moving image to advertise its products, the growing automobile industry likewise promoted and branded itself by underwriting automobile expedition films across the globe.¹⁷ The airline industry also capitalized on the moving image as a promotional device. As early as the 1940s, Pan American World Airlines had an entire division dedicated to the production of travelogues, with its catalog including over fifty films by the 1960s.¹⁸ This economic relationship between media and modes of transportation persists in the twenty-first century, as car companies continue to underwrite travel media to market their products and airlines use in-flight global entertainment to promote the value of cosmopolitan worldliness that is essential for their economic success.¹⁹

Beyond this mutually supportive economic relationship, numerous scholars have shown that travel and mobility are inscribed in the medium of cinema itself. From the earliest days of cinema, the experience of and attendant sociocultural shifts resultant from modern modes of transportation played a central role in shaping cinema into a machine for travel. According to Wolfgang Schivelbusch, railway travel ushered in a new perceptual paradigm as a result of the train’s annihilation of space and time. With the rapid pace of train travel, which radically reduced travel time, the space and time between previously distant locations dramatically shifted and contracted.²⁰ This created the paradox of open[ing] up new spaces that were not as easily accessible before, while also destroy[ing] space, namely the space between points.²¹ Schivelbusch describes these spatial and temporal shifts as the shrinking of the natural world, and his work describes the radically altered consciousness and perceptions of passengers as a consequence of it.²²

Seeing the world through panoramic perception was one of these consequences. According to Schivelbusch, before the development of the railroad, passengers traveling through space by horse or stagecoach understood themselves to be at one with the landscape through which they traveled. With the development of the train, Schivelbusch argues that travelers no longer experienced themselves in harmony with the landscape.²³ Instead, trains were considered projectiles careening through space while passengers were understood as parcels.²⁴ As a result, passengers’ perceptual experience of the landscape reshaped into a series of mobile and shifting representations mediated by the window.²⁵ According to Lynne Kirby, this perceptual shift enabled by the train’s annihilation of space and time and panoramic perception was mirrored in cinema and prepared spectators for its capabilities as a mode of transportation. Like the train, the moving image’s contraction of space and time via editing made the world more accessible, closer, and navigable.²⁶ Like the train passenger, the cinema spectator experienced the fundamental paradox of sitting still while moving—physically or metaphorically—through a unique configuration of space and time.²⁷

Cinema’s ability to serve as a travel machine was also materially dependent on machine age technology. Karen Beckman points out that the camera’s ability to move relied largely on a parasitic relationship with transportation technologies.²⁸ Indeed, one of the most common techniques of cinematography in early travelogues was the phantom ride, where a camera was placed on the front of a moving vehicle. In turn, early filmmakers drew on the concepts and experience of modern travel to showcase and shape the new mobile possibilities of cinema technology. Jon Gartenberg’s study of cinematography in early American cinema reveals the frequency with which camera movement, such as pans, dollies, and traveling shots, was used to depict passengers entering or departing cars, trains, and trolleys.²⁹ And Beckman’s work on the prevalence of car crashes in early cinema demonstrates how, despite being represented through static camera work, they became a way for filmmakers to discover the possibilities of the new art form, including the screen’s vertical dimensionality and the axis between the audience and the image.³⁰ It should come as no surprise, then, that, as Jeffrey Ruoff reminds us, travel is intrinsic to the language of cinema itself, being "consonant with common parlances such as the traveling shot and motion picture."³¹

Perhaps there is no greater example of the persistence of this intertwined relationship than the dependence of widescreen cinema formats, such as Cinerama (along with other midcentury widescreen technological developments) and IMAX, on ideas and technologies of travel and transportation. Alison Griffiths points out that both widescreen formats drew inspiration from early cinema travelogues, a fact that can be easily gleaned from their respective catalogs of films; Cinerama’s first five films were travel films, and, as Griffiths argues, IMAX continues to rely on travelogues as its key structuring principle.³² Indeed, she points out that to characterize IMAX as virtual travel or armchair tourism is something of a truism today; it is a theme that is central to its publicity, media reviews, and audience expectations.³³ Though Griffiths’s valuable work on these technologies reminds us that each stemmed from different aesthetic and industrial contexts, it also shows that in addition to their generic similarities as travelogues, the semantics of travel imbues them both.³⁴ This is primarily through their attempt to provide virtual travel through immersive spectatorship, what Griffiths characterizes as an embodied sense of being present in the scene.³⁵ This illusion of embodiment is created by cinematography and screen dimensions that collapse the distance between the mise-en-scène and the spectator and thus activate an embodied sensation in relation to the image.³⁶ As a form of virtual travel, this embodied sensation in both Cinerama and IMAX is most often felt in relation to movement; both heavily rely on the phantom ride camera technique popularized in early travelogues as a defining feature of their visual grammar. According to Lauren Rabinovitz, the central feature of the phantom ride film is its attempt to emphasize the spectator’s body itself as the center of an environment of action and excitement.³⁷ Indeed, Sara Ross highlights Cinerama’s consistent use of aerial cinematography and point-of-view shots to give audiences the illusion of soaring through the sky.³⁸ In turn, Griffiths argues that IMAX’s frequent use of high-altitude phantom ride camera work attempts to offer the viewer an embodied sense of penetrating and conquering space.³⁹

Cinema’s persistent combination of the aerial shot with phantom ride point-of-view cinematography reveals just how essential aviation technology has been to the development of film’s visual lexicon, mobile capabilities, and surrogacy for travel. Stephen Groening argues that, on the one hand, flying through the air is consonant with the distinct perceptual and bodily sensations initiated by earlier modes of transportation and experienced through cinema, including the contraction of space and time and the contradictory notion of simultaneous motion and stasis.⁴⁰ On the other hand, he argues that the view from the airplane offered a new vertical way of seeing the world that enhanced the experience of panoramic perception and broadened the definition of the panoramic view. While aerial views were first experienced in the nineteenth century through hot air balloon excursions and the many panoramas that mimicked their views and sensation, it was with the development of modern aviation technology that the aerial view found its ultimate expression and meanings.⁴¹ Groening suggests that the aerial view turned the atmosphere into landscape, a landscape that can be seen in numerous ways: obliquely out the window or media screen, as an all-encompassing view from the plane’s seemingly omniscient perspective, remediated through in-flight screen technology that reproduces the view from the cockpit, or reproduced through in-flight travelogue entertainment.⁴² As the history above suggests, this is an extension and deepening of virtual travel’s enduring enterprise of making every part of the globe accessible. This is a project that continues in the digital era; Google Earth’s Voyager feature boasts a 3D tool that enables users to see any place from any angle, leaving no part of the earth unavailable for virtual travel.⁴³

Significantly, it is also a project that accustomed moviegoers to consuming global mobility as a form of representation and entertainment.⁴⁴ Indeed, Jennifer Lynn Peterson argues that, in the early twentieth century, "one would have been more likely to envision travel as a series of representations of faraway places familiar from photographs, postcards, and moving pictures than as actual tourism.⁴⁵ As Tom Gunning argues, this phenomenon of representational travel not only results in the development of the cinematic armchair traveler, who sees images as a form of ersatz travel, but also permanently stitches travel and image making together such that images penetrate deeply into the process of travel itself, structuring our experience of the journey.⁴⁶ This structuring occurs in multidirectional ways: images stimulate viewers to travel, images shape itineraries and expectations, and images provide evidence of the journey. Image making can also serve as the raison d’être for traveling. Gunning notes, In the modern era the very concept of travel becomes intricately bound up with the production of images."⁴⁷ This means that, in addition to accustoming moviegoers to consume global mobility as a form of representation and entertainment, the symbiosis between cinema and travel also accustomed travelers to produce their own representations of global mobility. This was true even before the arrival of the moving image. As Nancy Martha West details, as early as 1881 Kodak’s advertising of its amateur cameras taught consumers that taking photographs is essential to travel.⁴⁸ This credo has deepened over time alongside the development of new consumer visual technologies, from 16 mm cameras and camcorders to cell phones and GoPro digital cameras. The union between travel and image taking is now so deeply entrenched that the former is practically inconceivable without the latter.

THE TOURIST GAZE

At the center of all these practices of mediated travel, from the mobility conferred by panoramic perception and phantom rides’ immersive spectatorship to the foreign landscapes of amateur and professional travelogues, is the act of looking and its concomitant point of view. As many scholars have argued, since the cinematic travelogue’s emergence, its point of view has been decidedly that of the tourist. Jennifer Lynn Peterson points out that despite travelogues’ development alongside a period of considerable migration to the United States, and in spite of the fact that immigrants made up a significant number of early cinema’s audience, rather than place viewers in the position of migrants, early travelogues primarily confer a tourist point of view on their spectators.⁴⁹ Given that leisure travel in the early twentieth century was still associated with upward mobility and elite tastes—despite it being more accessible than ever—Peterson argues that the travelogue’s adoption of the tourist point of view helped raise the cultural prestige of the genre; it staved off reformers who saw movies as cheap amusements in need of a moral face-lift, and it provided cultural capital to its viewers, who could harness the reputable status of the tourist point of view virtually.⁵⁰

As cinema’s first representations of travel, early travelogues (themselves influenced by precinematic forms of visual travel privileging a tourist perspective) thus tutored Western audiences and producers in the contours and particulars of the cinematic tourist point of view. A mode of film whose excessive form of looking is one of [its] most significant stylistic dimensions, the early travelogue opened up distant spaces to vision and outlined where to look and who and what to see. And they did so, Peterson further reminds us, in a decidedly nonneutral fashion; the tourist point of view, she argues, carries with it a great deal of ideological baggage about geography, gender, and race.⁵¹ Ellen Strain calls this ideological perspective of the real and imaginary traveler the tourist gaze, a phrase first used by the sociologist John Urry that Strain expands in order to analyze its mediated function and training beyond actual tourist experiences. Strain places the tourist gaze’s origin and growth in the nexus of classical anthropology, colonialism, capitalism, tourism, and visual culture in the nineteenth century: The ascendancy of touristic viewing took place against a background of unprecedented Western contact with the so-called margins of the earth. In the decades before the close of the nineteenth century, missionaries, surveyors, explorers, anthropologists, and colonialists vowed to fill in the few remaining blank spots on world maps and to close up the larger gaps in knowledge of the globe’s various inhabitants.⁵² Strain states that these explorations not only carved open these newly explored lands for leisure travel but also cemented the belief that the world is a pleasurable spectacle available for the Western tourist’s consumption and gaze.⁵³ To manage the anxiety attendant to encounters with the unknown, she argues that the touristic worldview required objectifying strategies that would enable pleasure rather than discomfort in cultural difference.⁵⁴ Strategies of the tourist gaze and its apparatus include reduction to surface spectacle; mystification; assimilation to Western structures of aesthetics; narrative, or scientific explanation; reduction to a simplistic surface/depth model demanding unveiling; totalization; essentialization; and synechdochic consumption, accumulation, and representation.⁵⁵ These strategies help the real or virtual tourist occupy a position of distanced immersion, which fulfills the desire to be fully immersed in a foreign culture while having enough of a separation to guarantee visual command of and physical refuge from cultural difference.⁵⁶

The tourist gaze, and its utility as a