Like most other industries, travel writing is dominated by white people. But unlike most other genres, writing travel has a specific history embedded in colonialism, the vestiges of which it hasn’t really attempted to shed.
In my classes and research, the same names were repeated as champions of the tradition: Joseph Conrad, Bruce Chatwin, Jack Kerouac, Bill Bryson, Rolf Potts, etc. And after reading the so-called classics, I was not only bored out of my mind. I was also wondering why today’s travel literature so greatly resembled the colonizer’s field notes of centuries past.
—Bani Amor
Why I Started a ‘Travel Writers of Color’ Book Club
2017
