This article explores travel television as a space for intercultural understanding. Previous studies have argued that the genre has little to offer in this respect. Such a response can partly be explained by its affinity to the tourist industry and in part by economic priorities of television channels. In addition, there are considerable challenges involved in describing foreign countries that make the genre vulnerable to allegations of stereotyping and Orientalism. Using insights from moral cosmopolitanism, humour theory and politeness studies, this article examines the communicative strategies of three popular travel series which display a self-reflexive awareness of the difficulties involved in addressing the Others.
This article presents an analysis of three Norwegian diasporic films made in 2005. The discussion is centred upon the thematic concerns of the films and their construction of ethnic identity seen in orientalist and occidentalist perspectives. The article argues that the films offer valuable insights into diasporic existence, and that the identity politics of the films -in spite of being marked both by orientalism and occidentalism -are characterized by a desire to avoid to obvious distinctions between good and bad ethnic groups.
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