How to decolonize travel? What does decolonization mean? This is one of the main reasons we exist as The Hybrid Tours. This is what we raise awareness about on our tours, and as of recently, our in-person events. Instead of writing another article explaining what that means, we’re doing what we do best: compiling the books and resources that shaped how we think about it, so you can dig in yourself.
If you’re here because you scanned a QR code at one of our events, welcome to our community of conscious and curious travelers!
This specific list was built around our event with Rida Ali, a Pakistani American journalist and historian whose work explores South Asian history and identity through a decolonial lens. Rida joined us for a conversation on how travel and storytelling can either reinforce a colonial gaze or actively resist it, and how that same tension shows up when diaspora communities travel back to reconnect with heritage. Her personal resources and recommendations can be found later in this article.
Foundational Theory
“Orientalism” by Edward Said. The book that named the pattern: how the West built an entire body of scholarship, art, and policy around a distorted, exoticized version of “the East” — and used it to justify domination.
“Culture and Imperialism” by Edward Said. Said’s follow-up, widening the lens from the Middle East to the broader reach of empire, tracing how literature and culture did quiet work in service of colonial expansion.
“The Wretched of the Earth” by Frantz Fanon. A foundational text on the psychological toll of colonialism and what decolonization actually demands, written by a psychiatrist who treated both the colonized and the colonizers during the Algerian war.
“How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” by Walter Rodney. A landmark argument that Africa’s underdevelopment wasn’t inevitable or accidental: it was engineered, systematically, through centuries of colonial extraction.
Travel and Tourism
“Airplane Mode” by Shahnaz Habib. A history of tourism itself: how travel became an industry built around who gets to move freely and who doesn’t, blending memoir and reporting on the mechanics of the passport, the visa, and the vacation.
“The Tourist Gaze” by John Urry. The academic groundwork for understanding tourism as a way of seeing: how what we expect to find shapes what we actually look for when we arrive somewhere new.
“Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation” by Mary Louise Pratt. Traces how centuries of travel writing didn’t just describe empire, it helped build the framework that justified it.
“A Small Place” by Jamaica Kincaid. A short essay on tourism in Antigua, written by someone who grew up watching visitors enjoy a version of her home that erased its colonial history entirely.
“Beyond Guilt Trips: Mindful Travel in an Unequal World” by Anu Taranath. A guide for travelers actually trying to navigate privilege, power, and inequality on the ground, without falling into performance or paralysis.
Development, Identity, and Empire
“Encountering Development” by Arturo Escobar. A critique of the entire “development” industry as an extension of colonial power, showing how even well-intentioned humanitarian aid work can reproduce the hierarchies it claims to dismantle.
“Good Muslim, Bad Muslim” by Mahmood Mamdani. How the West’s framing of Muslim identity after 9/11 has roots that go back decades further, into Cold War politics most people never connect to it. Written by Zohran Mamdani’s father.
“Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia” by Sam Dalrymple. A look at how colonial-era partitions redrew Asia’s borders and reshaped entire identities. This is great reading if you’re trying to understand how the region got the shape it has today.
“Fascist Yoga” by Stewart Home. A history of how Western yoga culture became entangled with fascist and white supremacist movements, complicating the “authentic wellness” story sold to travelers.
Memoir and Personal Narrative
“An Indian Among Los Indígenas” by Ursula Pike. A Native American Peace Corps volunteer’s memoir of her time in Bolivia: an honest look at what it means to be sent to “help” while carrying your own complicated history with colonization.
“The Ungrateful Refugee” by Dina Nayeri. A memoir that pushes back on the expectation that refugees perform gratitude for survival, and asks what it actually costs to be treated as a guest in a country that decides your worth.
“Perfect Victims” by Mohammed El-Kurd. A critique of how Palestinian suffering gets filtered through Western media into something legible and “sympathetic”, and who gets left out when a story doesn’t fit that shape.
Resources from Rida Ali:
Substacks we highly recommend:
The Colonial Invention Of Pristine Nature
We run tours in multiple countries. If you’d like to learn more about them through our reading lists, here are the links for Bosnia and Herzegovina, Jordan, Pakistan and Kosovo.
Happy Reading!
