Exotica Africana: interrogating African otherness in Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern

ABSTRACT

The marked reluctance to incorporate African agency in African image-making in the West quite predictably brought about flat and simplistic caricatures of the continent and its peoples. With the aim of interrogating continuity and change in the representation of Africa, this paper explores African exoticism in Travel Channel’s Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern. Framed within a critical cultural/postcolonial perspective that anchors discourses of exoticism in Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern, the study identifies the spectacular representational modes of the “crude” native, poverty, and primitivism as evidences of African otherness. Key findings of the study indicate that food in many African destinations is portrayed as mere materiality, and that African foodways are unsophisticated and lack any perceptible aesthetics or influence. Furthermore, the show stubbornly insists on Africa’s “primitiveness” as a binary condition to be contrasted with Western modernity, which, like the spectacle of poverty, marks the salience of African alterity.

KEYWORDS:

• Africa
• Bizarre Foods
• commodification
• culinary adventure programs
• exoticism
• postcolonial theory
• primitivism
• reality television
• spectacular consumption

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Dr. Rekha Sharma for her edits and Nahla Bendefaa for assisting in the data collection process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Kainaz Amaria is Visual Editor at Vox. The excerpt is adopted from her tweet on March 12, 2018. The full tweet can be found at https://twitter.com/kainazamaria/status/973413981246382083.

2. Throughout the paper, “S” is used as a short for “Season” and “E” for “Episode.”

3. The Kalahari is not a country. It is a large semi-arid sandy savanna in Southern Africa covering much of Botswana, parts of Namibia and regions of South Africa.

4. This critique stems from the author’s lived experience of growing up in the area. For additional information about Gurage culinary culture, see Kloman (2011).

5. For example, see Torchia (2014) on how sensational media coverage of the Ebola outbreak in a few countries in West Africa in 2014 resulted in travel embargoes and safari cancellations in noninfected countries many thousands of miles away.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Téwodros W. Workneh

Téwodros W. Workneh is Assistant Professor of Global Communication at the School of Communication Studies, Kent State University. Workneh’s research projects explore global media industries and policies through critical political economy and postcolonial approaches. His recent works investigate notions of hybridity, exoticism, and otherness in food-themed reality television programs.