Translating the Tropical Tourist Gaze: Hyperreal Asia in Pico Iyer’s Video Night in Kathmandu

Abstract

This article reads Pico Iyer’s Video Night in Kathmandu (1988) as a late–20^th century travelogue that registers the rise of a global tourist-media economy by showing how tropics are manufactured as an image-world—portable, purchasable, and increasingly self-conscious about its own display. By extending Orientalism through the lens of tropicality, treating “the tropics” as an environmental Orientalism in which climate and landscape become cultural explanation, moral alibi, and commercial asset, the article argues that Iyer’s most revealing scenes are not only about the circulation of American cultural forms but about the environmental staging that makes those forms feel natural to consume. Iyer’s itinerary shows tropicality operating less as strict geography than as a traveling aesthetic: paradise-and-peril, sensual overflow, managed risk, and atmospheric authenticity, refitted for the age of package tourism, franchised leisure, and air-conditioned comfort. The article frames travel writing as an unstable practice of cultural and climatic translation, oscillating between domestication by analogy and estrangement by excess, and argues that Video Night is neither a simple critique of Americanization nor a lament for lost authenticity, but a reflexive account of how tropical environments are converted into consumable scenes—and how that conversion remains tethered to infrastructures, labour, and uneven vulnerability.