A younger and much loved cousin contacted me recently, worried about the rising prices of Afropunk festival tickets for this year’s Brooklyn edition, which will be hosted this weekend. She reached out to me as I had told her of my plans to attend the festival with a friend. Besides her more general concerns that I should try to get an early bird ticket to avoid spending too much, she was also worried about the affect an increase in price would have on who would go on to attend the festival. Specifically, she was worried that less local Brooklynites would be able to attend due to the cost, paving the way for more (white) hipsters and yuppies. Communicated here, is the much wider concern over the level of white appropriation of spaces and cultures of colour at the same time as non-white individuals being prevented from enjoying their cultures and spaces. For example, there are numerous tales of black women and girls who have been criticised for or prevented from wearing natural hairstyles to work and school, such as braids, twists or afro-puffs. While it is not known whether or not white women are criticised for wearing braids to work, we do know that in recent times, white celebrities have been credited for starting trends such as “baby hair” or cornrows.

Meanwhile, we are already well-versed in the discourses highlighting the appropriation of various musical styles by white artists established within black communities (from blues, to jazz, to rock and roll to hip hop, etc). Furthermore, neighbourhoods such as Brooklyn in New York, Brixton in London and the Bijlmer in Amsterdam suffered from few resources and bad reputations, before hipsters moved in, removed local institutions and drove up property prices, thereby forcing out families who had been living in these neighbourhoods for generations.

These examples each correspond with my cousin’s fears for Afropunk festival as it becomes more popular and also at risk of becoming the next Coachella, i.e. a moment of recreation for the bored, rich white kids in their tunics and beaded jewellery, rather than an event of expression and celebration for people of colour. I will discuss in a later post on how Afropunk is a sort of pilgrimage for me to make, given my history of event and campaign organising, however for now, I’d like to focus on the politics of using certain spaces for mere amusement.

I’ve become increasingly interested lately in the imperial nature of globalisation and its link to the tourism industry. As someone who loves to travel (as hinted at since I’m going to New York for a music festival), this is often quite an awkward thought process for me to contend with. However the more I am confronted with the unbalance of space politics and cultural appropriation, the more I realise how much the material implications of the tourist industry (and other leisure industries) should be unpacked, discussed, critiqued and properly resolved.

As I have discussed in an earlier Rants & Raves post as well as in my recent article on The Clearing, the use of Roma caravans to sell a romantic sense of remoteness and isolation rings hollow when juxtaposed with the stark realities of isolation and remoteness experienced by Romany and Irish Traveller families due to NIMBYism and caravan site shortages. Furthermore, treating the cultures of caravan-dwelling communities in such a manner serves as a mechanism that diminishes their actual presence within society as well as undermining their socio-political exclusion. While many Roma caravan accommodation companies might argue they are honouring Roma culture, they do the opposite (albeit unwittingly) by feeding into existing discourses, which claim “real” Travellers live in bow-top wagons surrounded by pristine rural conditions, sustaining themselves by picking fruit in the summer. Anything deviating from this idyllic narrative simultaneously insists the culture is not authentic and therefore, the individuals are undeserving of their civic rights.

While I had noticed a certain level of space privilege and socio-economic unbalance when vacationing, the above conceptualisations surrounding the use of Roma caravans for “glamping” parks was a turning point in the way I understood the blatant cultural exploitation involved in tourism. No room is left for a fair exchange in many situations and thus instead of local communities benefitting from the money being poured into their nations and neighbourhoods by tourists, these spaces in fact become more of a playground for the apathetic and insensitive, who proudly seek to further their own personal geo-foot print.

Often the tourist industry also encourages blatant ignorance and insensitivity at certain locations. Take for instance the reported sale of golliwogs – an enduring symbol of British racism and imperialism – in a gift shop situated opposite the slavery museum in Liverpool, perhaps the UK’s most important institute to deal with this chapter of our history. Then there is the slave trail in Middelburg, The Netherlands, which instead of providing a damning critique of this chapter of Dutch history, glorifies the period and the economic gains established from it. Similarly is the “Africa Room” in a Belgian B&B, located in Brugge, which displays colonial posters and various other so-called African artefacts, which were (according to the owner) collected at various jumble sales and local auctions. The owner admitted he himself had never been to the continent and did not know very much about Belgium’s colonial history in Africa, let alone more general facts related to any African culture or history. The tour guides at Cape Coast and Elmina slave forts in Ghana do their best to honestly portray the horror of their sites of employment, however the gift shop makes light of the historical purpose of the fortresses.

Southern plantations have been opened up in the USA for tourism, which (for the same reasons as the slave forts in Ghana) doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing if these artefacts can be used to properly educate people about this shocking and brutal history. Unfortunately, influential publications such as the Lonely Planet books give a more romantic image, with one edition stating:

“Designed in 1741, this plantation’s vast gardens are the oldest in the US. One hundred slaves spent a decade terracing the land and digging the precise geometric canals…The bewitching grounds are a mix of classical formal French gardens and romantic woodland, bounded by flooded rice paddies and rare-breed farm animals.” – Page 358

Meanwhile, the Maritime museum and lighthouse in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil barely deals with slavery or the true nature of the Portuguese invasion at all. Some details are shoved in as an aside, however the wording on the display implies that these incidents were so long ago that they are not relevant anymore, Brazilian society is entirely interracial and equal. This of course could not be further from the truth.

These issues within the tourism industry became magnified for me by Dutch immigrants in both Tamale, Ghana and Kapas Island, Malaysia (interestingly, former colonies of the Netherlands) who set out to create their own versions of “paradise” in these distant lands. While I only reviewed the website for the Dutch-owned resort in Kapas, I actually stayed at the gloriously described guesthouse in Tamale, where I was greeted by rude owners, who barked at their staff, displayed Zwarte Piet iconography and had furnished their rooms with dirty, broken items from IKEA. These people were not interested in making the best of their opportunity; they appeared to take it for granted that they could hang out, make a decent living and control the livelihoods of local people.

Another immigrant I did meet in Malaysia, was a guy from Den Haag who helped out with a market tour and cooking course in Georgetown. While his enthusiasm and welcoming nature were really great initially, things became awkward when he began correcting and contradicting the chef. Of course, the chef could well have been wrong about key ingredients to recipes in her own cook book or the history of the local market she had frequented for years before this Den Haag dude showed up with a backpack. But it’s unlikely, isn’t it? This year, I attended another market tour (which is also part of a cooking course) in Den Haag with my husband. Truth be told, the tour and course were a wedding gift to us. We never would have picked it out for ourselves on account of the fact that I hate fish (and the chef only uses fish) and the tour is at our local market, which turned out to be very awkward when we began walking passed our usual vendors. Furthermore, the chef and tour guide turned this neighbourhood shopping space into a site of intrigue and exploration for the suburban set who came to gaze at the “coloured” urbanites in their natural habitat. One telling moment included us going over to a Caribbean vegetable stall to just look at the produce. The chef openly admitted that he didn’t know what any of the products were used for and did not engage with the vendors at all to find out, instead showing off his knowledge of onions and potatoes. Moreover, he insisted that I “must know” – even after I explained that I was English and not of Caribbean descent.

In our neighbourhood, we have Turkish restaurants, Moroccan bakeries, Hindustani dress-makers, Ghanaian braiders, Polish delis, Dutch florists, Iranian jewellers… all before getting to the well known and much loved Haagsemarkt. There is real cultural vibrancy and exchanges in our quarter however as the above example illustrates, this provides plenty of opportunity for appropriation, gentrification and voyeurism.

This brings me back to the concerns for Afropunk festival.

It remains as critical as ever for people of colour around the globe to have access to safe spaces where we can express our cultures and our politics undisturbed and without threat of violence, especially given the level of brutality and control exhibited towards black bodies, be it in the USA, Europe, North Africa or South-East Asia or Australia. It is worth reiterating that white people have been able to travel unhindered and unharmed to all of these aforementioned spaces, turning them into their own adventure wonderlands, with very little regard for the socio-political unbalances that they may contribute to by just showing up. It must be easy to ignore that the USA and Australia were stolen from indigenous people and founded upon racist ideals for the purpose of white gain, if all you want to do is have a good time. But is it right? Especially given the current institutional racism of both countries?

Where we have the opportunities and resources to understand how our histories connect to present conflicts, we should make the most of them, which from a tourism and leisure perspective, requires us to divert attention from foolishness and promote healthier knowledge systems. We should for instance, support conscious and collaborative tourist projects such as the One Africa resort in Ghana – who take a critical approach to the West’s effect on Africa and promote a better understanding of West African culture and history. We can also contribute to and promote critical travel blogs and journals, which give a much needed counter narrative to mainstream tourist rhetoric. Furthermore, we should be more open to learning simple points of information, such as where to stay, how to behave, when to travel (during the calendar year) as well as how to spend money responsibly. Finally, we should ensure that when we launch projects that are supposed to be for our communities, be they for entertainment or education, that they remain accessible to those communities and that their cultural and political essence is sustainable.