Seeing

This chapter, focusing on charity and gap-year tourism, examines the ethics and power relations involved in seeing. Noting the dominance of vision in travel narratives, it considers the relationship between seeing and being seen. A discussion on Jean-Christophe Perrot’s and Diego Audemard’s 2007 Tandems africains, in which the authors rely on blind or partially sighted local guides during their journey across sub-Saharan Africa, illuminates how the writers’ experience is thus mediated by the non-seeing guides. Although the gap-year travellers share ‘something of the discourses of discovery and domination associated with seeing and thus knowing’, their ‘journey of self-discovery’ affects them and has a lasting impact on the travellees through media coverage and donations from the book’s profits.