Abstract
Independent travel is constructed by its adherents as a more benign form of travel than mass tourism. Yet this alternative form of travel remains implicated in colonial legacies through its adherence to the liberal project of self-development. Through voluntarily undertaking hardship and narrating their experiences to other travelers and broader audiences, independent travelers depend upon the very same structural inequalities they seek to overcome in order to construct the liberal self, which is itself implicated in colonialism.
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