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Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Rhian Waller | Postcolonial Pictures 53 of southern history, glamourising and fetishizing antebellum architecture and class structure. Others struggle with the legacy of colonialism, experiencing generational poverty rooted in segregation and the slave trade. The reflection of the “PASTIME” sign in a puddle seems to hint at this: the past is not “dead, nor past” (Theroux, 2015: 79), it can be reflected and distor- ted. The drama of difference, here, is not based on exposing an audience to Othered and exotic nationalities, cultures and races, but on tension between Theroux’s (and his imaginary readers’) comparatively privileged experience and the experiences of their economically disenfranchised neighbours. The viewer, again positioned by the photograph as a traveller, is placed in a privi- leged position; they can choose to explore or escape these signs of poverty. The subjects encoun- tered in the text cannot. And, like the inhabitants of Africa and Mexico, the dispossessed of the US south are rendered invisible. It is interesting that, set beside narratives about Africa, Mexico and rural China, the USA, a nation suffused with myths of social mobility and economic power is depicted most directly as depressed, derelict and damaged. The foregrounding of North American poverty signifies the disruption of the American Dream and neo-liberal capitalist ideologies, and provides an intro- duction to a travelogue that shows a more nuanced, intersectional view of dominance and sub- ordination and takes into account race, class, intra-cultural inequalities and internal politics. While the NIM and DIM covers uphold colonial and neo-colonial assumptions, the cover of Deep South breaks these down by exposing exceptions to the dominant US narratives. It marks a departure from the established pattern of visibility and invisibility, but this pattern-breaking strengthens the argument that grand narratives are more likely to be successfully contested by privileged insiders. The single striking exception to this pattern is the 1992 cover of The Happy Isles of Oceania. This is the only image that foregrounds human faces. Three boys, bare-legged and bare-chested, are captured standing in water. It is a complicated cover, part action-image (one of the boys appears to be moving forward), part candid (the moving boy seems unaware of the camera) and partly posed. This is “paradise confused” (Dann, 1996), offering a point of contact with natives in an apparently locals-only zone. As Kress and van Leeuwen explain, “The relation between the human participants repre- sented in images and the viewer is once again an imaginary relation. People are portrayed as though they are friends, or as though they are strangers” (2006: 132). The portrayal here is con- siderably more intimate than on other covers, but the imagined relationship with the viewer is uncertain, partly because the depicted faces and bodies bear a blend of ambiguous expressions. One boy smiles, perhaps welcoming, but his crossed arms imply self-consciousness. The other frowns, and his stance, one foot elevated on a rock, suggests a degree of territorialism. The photocomposition is, interestingly, quasi-aquatic, the lens part-submerged, the cover bisected by the water surface. This doubly signifies the meeting of two worlds, and it also indexes abstract notions of (cultural) immersion and a glimpse into a region normally distorted or obscured by its surface. The liminality of the ocean surface is a powerful and established metaphor for “divi- sion[…] connection, or […] a surface of connection amidst division” (Steinberg, 2014: 34), and is suggestive of change, instability and fluidity, both physical and cognitive, a symbol of “the ultimate unmappability of identity and meaning” (Borg Bathet, 2014). Travel writing seems to fix identity: Theroux’s fleeting and often-unflattering impressions of his subjects are made