White Travel Imaginary and Media Contestations of Race

Representations of Black travelers are often missing from travel media in favor of white able-bodied cisgender women and men. Lack of representation is a component of the white travel imaginary, a technological and physical as well as an epistemological and ontological conven-tion that marginalizes Black experience in travel media. This study explicates a new theoretical paradigm for analyzing how race and representation function in the media. Employing visual and textual analysis as a method of exploring the white travel imaginary, I examine @ historyofblacktravel and @blacktravelalliance, connected Instagram accounts highlighting the global movements of Black travelers. I show how scholars can employ the white travel imagi-nary framework when examining social media to critically analyze how travel is racially situ-ated. (c) 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.