Abstract
This chapter examines how travel guides and ethnic novels, despite being mainstream cultural representations, reproduce hegemonic narratives of U.S. exceptionalism by enabling consumers to experience the “authentic” postcolonial other. It analyzes three different sets of texts that all serve to deliver the colonized other to a mainstream U.S. public that is specific to its particular historical context: Our Islands and Their People (1899), the popular travel guide Lonely Planet: Philippines and Lonely Planet: Puerto Rico, and the novels Dogeaters (by Jessica Hagedorn) and América's Dream (by Esmeralda Santiago). The chapter shows how these novels and travelogues reproduce narratives of U.S. exceptionalism and affirm U.S. global power independently, without overt ties to the U.S. government. It argues that the ethnic novel delivers the postcolonial other for consumption by a mainstream U.S. audience while the travel guide recommends how best to consume the postcolonial nation.
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