‘Survivor Guatemala’: Reality TV With Roots in Antebellum Travel Writing?
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 10.19.05 | 12:02 PM ET
How we love academic perspectives on American pop culture, especially when they relate to travel and travel writing. This interesting article, written by University of Pennsylvania associate history professor Amy S. Greenberg, argues that Survivor Guatemala: The Maya Empire has more to do with American empire than anything. She traces America’s fascination with the tropics back through history—back, in fact, to antebellum travel writing. “Survivor was a sequel from the start,” she writes. “The appeal of the tropics as idealized location for the triumph of American enterprise and individualism is nothing new and, in fact, is a reoccurring theme in periods of American imperial expansionism.”
Among other highlights from the Common-Place.org article:
Tropical travel narratives, in both book and article form, proliferated in the 1840s and 1850s and offered a vision of the tropical portions of the Western Hemisphere, from the Caribbean to Hawaii, as ripe for American takeover. Less concerned with the civilizations of the south, than with spreading American civilization to the south, travel writers repeatedly pointed out that “the enterprise of the states” was all that was needed to turn tropical land into “a paradise” and contrasted the “slothful” and “lazy” local men with the energetic and hard-working American settlers who were bound to displace them. Appealing both to expansionists convinced that America’s Manifest Destiny was yet to be fulfilled and to displaced workingmen searching for opportunity, these narratives of Americans in the tropics promised, as Survivor and its kin do today, that yesterday’s failure in the United States could be tomorrow’s success in the tropics.
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
