Tourism of the Familiar

A raft of videos has been generated offering online tours of U.S. headquartered Walmart retail stores in China. These videos, mostly made by American citizens, generate and satisfy curiosity about the ways in which Walmart looks-and-doesn’t-look like the stores in the U.S. and the ways it has become an “exotic” expression of a familiar form. Deploying Said’s notion of Orientalism in a digital ethnography of the video tours, this paper explores the colonial and ethno-racial play between identification with the quintessential American brand and reaction to its hybridized form in China.