Exotica Africana: interrogating African otherness in Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern

ABSTRACT The marked reluctance to incorporate African agency in African image-making in the West quite predictably brought about flat and simplistic caricatures of the continent and its peoples. With the aim of interrogating continuity and change in the representation of Africa, this paper explores African exoticism in Travel Channel’s Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern. Framed within a critical cultural/postcolonial perspective that anchors discourses of exoticism in Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern, the study identifies the spectacular representational modes of the “crude” native, poverty, and primitivism as evidences of African otherness. Key findings of the study indicate that food in many African destinations is portrayed as mere materiality, and that African foodways are unsophisticated and lack any perceptible aesthetics or influence. Furthermore, the show stubbornly insists on Africa’s “primitiveness” as a binary condition to be contrasted with Western modernity, which, like the spectacle of poverty, marks the salience of African alterity.