First-Year Seminar: Travel Noire: Consumption and the Gaze in the Black Travel Movement

AFRICAN AND AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUDIES 195


This course explores the growing industry of leisure tourism catering to Black people. It takes as its premise that tourism is more than just voluntary, recreational travel; it is an encounter shot through with desire, intimacy, and ideology. We approach the tourism encounter from both sides-the consumer and the consumed-as we explore various types of tourism from domestic and international tourism to sex tourism and heritage tourism. If tourism is a desire machine, what desires of self and other are reflected in the discourse about travel noire? Who is being consumed and what is being made consumable in this growing market space? Students will be required to create a travel itinerary based in Missouri during the course and propose a narrative revision to a local tourism destination. This course is for first-year, non-transfer students only.
Course Attributes: EN S; BU BA; AS LCD; AS SSC; FA SSC; AR SSC