Joris Lechêne: how can we avoid the tourist gaze?

A little advice from an Instagrammer with a difference...

Joris Lechêne is a trainer in anti-racism, bias, privilege and decoloniality. Drawing on his lived experience of various marginalised identities at the intersections of race, neurodivergence, class and sexual orientation, he combines his practice of sociology with his lived experience navigating the colonial world to propose analytical frameworks, create workshops, content and strategies tackling the topics of systemic inequalities, bias and decoloniality. Follow Joris on Tiktok and Instagram.

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I’ve been doing travel journalism for four years now. My most successful pieces have been viewed millions of times each, and yet you’ve never seen me on a press trip, I’ve never got to pitching my ideas to an editor, and I’ve never been commissioned to write a piece for any travel publications. 

If you wonder why my name doesn’t sound familiar, the obvious explanation is that my writings aren’t published on a blog, a newsletter or in mainstream media: they are consumed in the form of short videos for TikTok and Instagram.

Beyond the prejudice against the medium, the audience typically associated with those platforms, and beyond the debate around whether I am a travel journalist or an influencer, there is another reason why my work doesn’t seem to receive the same treatment as travel journalism pieces of comparable reach. My fellow guest writers on this series have shone a light on the discrimination they were experiencing in the industry as marginalised writers; but I believe that the snubbing of my work points to another bias inherent to conventional travel storytelling: whose point of view are we typically honouring? 

When I wrote about Amsterdam, I interviewed sex workers of the Red Light District who are facing eviction, as the municipality tries to make the area more commercially profitable, while still benefitting from the raunchy reputation enjoyed by the neighbourhood around the world. 

In Benidorm, I found that the biggest crime the universally decried Spanish resort had committed was daring to cater to working-class holidaygoers. 

In Salvador, I explored how the traditionally Afro-Brazilian celebration of Carnival as a subversion of social norms and expression of Black identity was slowly being appropriated and repurposed to uphold existing social and racial hierarchies. 

In my home island of Guadeloupe, I showed the subtle ways in which beach hotels bypassed the legal requirement to allow public access to the beach and kept the locals away. 

Also watch: Do you know who is not employed in this Guadeloupe beach hotel? Guadeloupeans! A tale of the (dis)illusion of tourism as the saviour of the economy in the Caribbean.

My work centres the marginalised experience of the locals, rather than the comfort and perspective of the traveller. You might argue that the whole point of travel journalism is to appeal to prospective explorers by telling them enticing stories about pleasure and comfort that they could experience, not the hardship and struggles that the locals do experience, and you might have a point… But I would like to invite you to think: why is that?

We cannot address racism, in any industry, if we don’t first understand the purpose of racism: 

Racism is a tool of oppression which serves to arbitrarily divide social groups. It creates an emotional disconnect, a power imbalance, and provides the material conditions, as well as moral justifications for the dominant (or privileged) side of that divide, to enjoy the benefits of the exploitation of the other side without having to feel too bad about themselves. 

And this, in a nutshell, is what the travel industry is historically premised upon.  

Growing up on a Caribbean Island, whose economy was held hostage by a neocolonial relationship with the French Metropole in the form of mass tourism, I was always irked by the way tourists would move through our spaces, talk about us, even when they had the purest intentions. It’s only now, with my understanding of sociology and coloniality that I am able to name what made me so uncomfortable: the tourist gaze. 

Their actions had nothing to do with a lack of politeness, or not showing appreciation for the local customs and practices. The tourist gaze is an impalpable barrier that is being placed between the tourist and the local, between the observer and the observed, like the glass wall of a terrarium separating the bedazzled child from the captive lizard.

Even when setting aside all considerations of racial and social power imbalance (which are very much present in the Caribbean context of tourism), the tourist gaze turns the agent into a subject. It has the disarmingly insidious power of making you feel othered in your own home, exotic in your own environment. 

It is our responsibility as travel storytellers, not just to occasionally venture on the other side of the invisible barrier for a one-off article, but to call it out in all of our work, to learn from the locals how to describe it, how they experience it, and to inspire our audiences to dismantle it. 

So, what exactly can you do? 

The first question to ask yourself is: whose perspective is being centred in your writing? Who are we supposed to identify with? There is no reason why your readers should be encouraged to empathise more with the hotel owners than with the hotel’s room cleaners, with whom they probably have much more in common outside of the performative acts of tourism. 

Secondly, how can you ensure that you aren’t promoting an extractive and exploitative perception of The Other? 

Here, I think that the work of Linda Tuhiway Smith, a decolonial academic from Aotearoa, who has written extensively about how to not reproduce extractive and exploitative practices when doing scientific research on Indigenous people, gives us some tools that I believe also apply to travel journalism, in 3 main principles: 

• Co-creation with the community you are writing about: rather than describing people and their lives to your audience at home, let your writing be the vessel through which they describe themselves to your readers. Let them be agents, not subjects. 

• Reciprocity: establish how they will benefit from your work, as they are instrumental to it. 

• Relatedness: seek to connect, and invite your readers to relate to people, their culture, their way of being, their land, the stories they tell, but also their struggles. 

Travel journalism is already a highly elitist industry. On top of that, traveling itself, being a tourist or an explorer, is a performance of power and privilege that tends to coincide with the Global North/Global South divide that was shaped by colonisation.  

But this is not about feeling shame or guilt for a system that would still exist without you in it, it’s about recognising the responsibility that you have, and the power that your privileges afford you to change a system which locks the locals into the role of captive lizards and the traveller into that of a child gazing through the glass. 

Ultimately, I am not entirely sure whether my work counts as travel journalism. My ambition is much more modest than to be accepted into “the club”. I simply want to flip the global tourism industry on its head and set it on a path towards the inevitable decolonisation of our world. No biggie. 

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This is the fifth post in our series on race and racism in travel writing. If you’ve found this series enlightening, support our newsletter by subscribing today for just £7 a month. Paid subscribers get access to our entire archive of editor interviews, tips and insights, as well as weekly newsletters that promise to help your career grow.

Don’t forget to check out the back catalogue of Travel Writing Webinars by Meera Dattani for extra tips about pitching, networking, and writing award-worthy features.