Page - 14 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020

14 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Birgit Englert, Sandra Vlasta | Travel Writing Both authors were well aware of the power of the paratext and used it to characterize their reports: in the case of Forster, the voyage and everything connected to it is presented as enligh- tening, not least for the reader; in Moritz’s text, the enlightened subject is central. Rhian Waller also focuses on the paratextual elements of travelogues, underscoring the importance of book covers in establishing the nature and context of written works. In her contribution, Waller understands book covers as visual social semiotic forms that comprise textual and visual signifiers which may encode meanings beyond the commercial purpose of the book cover. She examines the Penguin edition book covers of Paul Theroux’s travel writing through a visual social semiotic lens and identifies the ways in which they display (and thus confirm) unequal power relationships between western travellers and the peoples and cultures they encounter. Thus the images — which, as Waller notes, were most likely chosen not by the author but by the publisher — are at times in opposition to Theroux’s texts, which prove to be much more reflective and self-critical than the cover images suggest. Nevertheless, the stereotypical representations on the book covers are appealing to book buyers. This may have to do with the development of the genre: travelogues have long played a role in passing down and developing stereotypes. More recent forms of travelogue have likewise been dominated by cultural stereotypes — about both travellees and travellers. Accordingly, Anna Karina Sennefel- der takes up the topic of cultural stereotypes and their visual realization in her analysis of con- temporary cinematic travel documentaries, a genre which has enjoyed increasing popularity in Germany over the past five years. Sennefelder argues that these documentaries are characterized by an almost exclusive focus on the subjective experience of the travelling self. As she points out, ‘these crowdfunded and personalized travel documentaries emerged from the prosumer-culture of digital communication and social media, such as the travel vlog, and the influences of the sub-genre’s origins are still personalized in their visual aesthetics and discursive patterns’ (91). By employing a multimodal analysis, Sennefelder focuses on two highly successful examples of this sub-genre: Weit (Far, 2017) and Reiss aus (Break Free, 2019), demonstrating how the films exhibit stereotypical attributions of cultural identity — against the filmmakers’ intentions. In a similar manner, the blog format, which in the past twenty years has become an espe- cially popular means of documenting the travel experiences of non-professionals and professio- nals alike, offers manifold examples of stereotypical representations of the other, but also of the self. In her blog The Blonde Abroad, a woman who introduces herself as ‘Kiki, a California native, who left [her] career in corporate finance to become a world traveler’, portrays herself as someone who embodies the dominant standards of the beauty industry: young, slim and blonde. Her own styling is presented as a harsh contrast to the people she meets on her travels. In one of her entries on Botswana, for example, she poses in front of luxury lodges dressed in typical ‘safari style’ outfits, with further images of meerkats and two images of unnamed Khoi- san people in traditional clothing representing the wilderness.6 There are also clearly plenty of examples where masculinity (as opposed to femininity) is displayed in a similar one-dimen- sional manner. A blog by the Austrian Joe Pichler provides an example in which a motorcycle serves to underscore the masculinity of the traveller, who reaches locations considered ‘out of the way’ by ordinary travellers.7 Pichler also reports from his adventure trips in the form of 6 https://theblondeabroad.com/staying-at-jacks-camp-in-botswana/; c.f. also https://blondearoundtheworld.com/. 7 http://www.josef-pichler.at/.