Original Story Published by: Jacob Henry for The Conversation
Photography courtesy of: CNN
The television personality rejected the monolithic way media outlets have depicted the continent's diverse cultures and populations.
Anthony Bourdain might have been a celebrity chef, but viewers of his Emmy Award-winning travel show, Parts Unknown, didn’t tune in for curry and noodle recipes.
Cooking was simply the conceit Bourdain used to have a conversation about the culture, politics, struggles and triumphs of people around the world.
As a human geographer, I was drawn to how Bourdain upended the travel show genre, telling compelling and complicated stories about people and places most Western viewers tend to view through a lens of simplistic stereotypes or caricatures.
Even more remarkable, his work wasn’t relegated to obscurity. The show aired on CNN – a mainstream cable outlet with millions of viewers.
I was especially interested in the way the show depicted Africa, a continent Western media tends to portray using what novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie famously called a “single story” – a monolithic narrative of poverty, backwardness and hopelessness.
So in a paper published last fall, I analysed Bourdain’s Africa episodes, which took viewers to Congo-Kinshasa, South Africa, Tanzania, Madagascar and Ethiopia.
To read the full article, visit The Conversation.
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