Recreating Healthy Nationalism on the National Geographic Channel

• In Event: Globalization, National Pride, and Thinking about the Visual

Abstract

I argue that ‘nation-branding’ on the National Geographic Channel reality series, “Worlds Apart”, symbolically reinforces the idea of a ‘natural’ hierarchy of nations within globalization, while restoring ‘healthy’ national pride in American viewers. The show fetishizes third world ‘lack’ as visual proof of the superiority of the American ‘race.’ The technologies of this first world gaze produce what I term ‘specular geographies,’ or a neocolonial visual mapping of nations into spaces of modernity and under-development.

Author

• Ishita Sinha Roy, Allegheny College