Det riktiga Kenya och orientaliska Tunisien : En diskursanalys av Lonely Planets guideböcker om Tunisien och Kenya

Sammanfattning: Presentations of Oriental people as subordinated the West and their ideals was one way for Europeans to expand and keep control over their colonies in Africa during the nineteenth- and twentieth centuries. France and Great Britain controlled their colonies in different ways which has led to diverse legacies. Today, tourism is a source of revenue for former colonies, such as Tunisia and Kenya, and tourism also helps to spread knowledge and images of distant countries. A guidebook is one way that knowledge of other countries and people are spread to travelers. During history, images of distant people were based on a colonial discourse in which the west was seen as superior; but is that still the case? The purpose of this paper was to analyze how Tunisia and Kenya are presented in the Lonely Planet guide to Tunisia and the Lonely Planet guide to Kenya to investigate if they are constructed through a colonial discourse, and to see if there are any dissimilarities on how they are presented. With a postcolonial theory and critical discourse analysis and with a colonial discourse as framework, the guidebooks were examined to see how people and culture were presented. The research showed that Lonely Planet guidebooks use a colonial discourse in the presentation of Tunisia and Kenya where distinctions are made between the inhabitants and the western world. The Orient was subordinated the superior Occident which reinforces the notion of others as being different and less than the west. Diversities between how Tunisia and Kenya were drawn in the guidebooks were found. The colonial heritage was more present in Tunisia than in Kenya, while in Kenya the people were presented as more brutal than in Tunisia. Reasons for that could be many, but the critical issue is why the western world still constructs other people as subordinate and different.