Worlds Apart: nation-branding on the National Geographic Channel

This article argues that ‘nation-branding’ on the National Geographic Channel symbolically reinforces the idea of a ‘natural’ hierarchy of nations within globalization. I examine how, as ‘edutainment’, the American reality television series Worlds Apart (2003), teaches US viewers how to navigate the ideological spaces of home and the world. The tourist ethnographies of American families visually fetishize Third World ‘lack’ as proof of the superiority of the American ‘race’. The show suggests America’s move away from insular nationalism even as it advocates the primacy of home/homeland. 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 underdevelopment.