Dark tourism and postcolonial studies: critical intersections

Postcolonial Studies

Volumn 17, Issue 3, 2014, Pages 236-250

  Carrigan, Anthony ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84937630144     PISSN: 13688790     EISSN: 14661888     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2014.993425     Document Type: Article

References (53)

1. One useful recent starting point for thinking about how dark tourism is framed and analysed is Tazim Jamal and Linda Lelo’s chapter, ‘Exploring the Conceptual and Analytical Framing of Dark Tourism: From Darkness to Intentionality’, in Richard Sharpley and Philip R Stone (eds), Tourist Experience: Contemporary Perspectives, London: Routledge, 2014, pp 29–42
2. John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster, Andover: Cengage, 2010 [2000], p 3
3. Lennon and Foley, Dark Tourism, p 11
4. Richard Sharpley, ‘Introduction: Shedding Light on Dark Tourism’, in Richard Sharpley and Philip R Stone (eds), The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism, Bristol: Channel View, 2009, p 4.
5. Malcolm Foley and John Lennon’s ‘JFK and Dark Tourism—A Fascination with Assassination’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 2(4), 1996, pp 198–211
6. Tony Seaton’s ‘Guided by the Dark: From Thanatopsis to Thanatourism’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 2(4), 1996, pp 234–244
7. Craig Wight, ‘Contested National Tragedies: An Ethical Dimension’, in Sharpley and Stone, The Darker Side of Travel, p 129
8. Sharpley, ‘Introduction’, p 6
9. Sharpley, ‘Introduction’, pp 13–14
10. Lennon and Foley, Dark Tourism, p 163
11. Wight, ‘Contested National Tragedies’, p 129
12. J E Tunbridge and G J Ashworth, Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict, New York: Wiley, 1996
13. Sharpley, ‘Introduction’, p 12
14. Richard Sharpley, ‘Dark Tourism and Political Ideology: Towards a Governance Model’, in Sharpley and Stone, The Darker Side of Travel, p 151
15. Seaton’s essay is particularly problematic in the way it approaches the marketing of otherness by constructing postcolonial studies as a straw figure on the basis of limited engagement with relevant research in the field—a caricature that excludes the many exciting possibilities for productive exchange between postcolonial and dark tourism research.
16. Tony Seaton, ‘Purposeful Otherness: Approaches to the Management of Thanatourism’, in Sharpley and Stone, The Darker Side of Travel, pp 75–108
17. Jacqueline Z Wilson, ‘Dark Tourism and National Identity in the Australian History Curriculum: Unexamined Questions Regarding Educational Visits to Sites of Human Suffering’, in Elspeth Frew and Leanne White (eds), Tourism and National Identities: An International Perspective, London: Routledge, 2011, p 202
18. Wilson, ‘Dark Tourism and National Identity in the Australian History Curriculum’, p 203
19. Wilson, ‘Dark Tourism and National Identity in the Australian History Curriculum’, pp 209–211
20. Elspeth Frew and Leanne White, ‘Exploring Dark Tourism and Place Identity’, in Leanne White and Elspeth Frew (eds), Dark Tourism and Place Identity: Managing and Interpreting Dark Places, London: Routledge, 2013, p 4
21. Maximiliano Korstanje, ‘Review of Dark Tourism and Place Identity: Managing and Interpreting Dark Places’, Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 12(4), 2014, pp 369–370
22. Linda Lelo and Tazim Jamal, ‘African Americans at Sites of Darkness: Roots-Seeking, Diasporic Identities and Place-Making’, in White and Frew, Dark Tourism and Place Identity, p 37
23. Maria Teresa Simone-Charteris, Stephen W Boyd and Amy Burns, ‘The Contribution of Dark Tourism to Place Identity in Northern Ireland’, in White and Frew, Dark Tourism and Place Identity, p 74
24. Philip R Stone, ‘Dark Tourism, Heterotopias and Post-Apocalyptic Places: The Case of Chernobyl’, in White and Frew, Dark Tourism and Place Identity, p 91
25. Peter Hohenhaus, ‘Commemorating and Commodifying the Rwandan Genocide: Memorial Sites in a Politically Difficult Context’, in White and Frew, Dark Tourism and Place Identity, pp 145, 153
26. Paul Willard, Clare Lade and Warwick Frost, ‘Darkness Beyond Memory: The Battlefields at Culloden and Little Bighorn’, in White and Frew, Dark Tourism and Place Identity, p 273
27. I have in mind here books like Mark Anderson’s Disaster Writing: The Cultural Politics of Catastrophe in Latin America, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011, which demonstrates how particular narratives compete to ‘hold sway over the collective imagination and … political establishment’ in the wake of disasters, but which makes only limited reference to tourism.
28. Anderson, Disaster Writing, pp 2, 42–43
29. Lennon and Foley, Dark Tourism, pp 8–9, 23
30. Richard Sharpley, ‘Review of Writing the Dark Side of Travel’, Studies in Travel Writing 17(1), 2013, p 102
31. Jonathan Skinner, ‘Introduction: Writings on the Dark Side of Travel’, in Jonathan Skinner (ed), Writing the Dark Side of Travel, New York: Berghahn, 2012, p 18
32. Rachael Moffat, ‘Visiting Rwanda: Accounts of Genocide in Travel Writing’, in Skinner, Writing the Dark Side of Travel, p 95
33. Tristram Walker, ‘Graphic Wounds: The Comic Journalism of Joe Sacco’, in Skinner, Writing the Dark Side of Travel, pp 74, 78
34. Lennon and Foley, Dark Tourism, p 9
35. Nagle includes a suggestive quotation to this effect from Vamik Volkan who states that, in many cases of ethnic conflict, ‘the interpretations, fantasies and feelings about a past shared trauma co-mingle with those pertaining to a current situation. Under the influence of a time collapse, people may intellectually separate the past [experience] from the present one, but emotionally the two events are merged.’
36. John Nagle, ‘Between Trauma and Healing: Tourism and Neoliberal Peace Building in Divided Societies’, in Skinner, Writing the Dark Side of Travel, p 38
37. Avital Birna and Kenneth F Hyde, ‘New Perspectives on Dark Tourism’, International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research 7(3), 2013, p 191
38. Dorinna Maria Buda and Alison Jane McIntosh, ‘Dark Tourism and Voyeurism: Tourist Arrested for “Spying” in Iran’, International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research 7(3), 2013, pp 217, 223.
39. Michael S Bowman and Phaedra C Pezzullo, ‘What’s so “Dark” about “Dark Tourism”? Death, Tours, Performance’, Tourist Studies 9(3), 2010, pp 187–202
40. Skinner, ‘Introduction’, p 5
41. Raynald Harvey Lemelin, Kyle Powys Whyte, Kelsey Johansen, Freya Higgins Desbiolles, Christopher Wilson and Steve Hemming, ‘Conflicts, Battlefields, Indigenous Peoples and Tourism: Addressing Dissonant Heritage in Warfare Tourism in Australia and North America in the Twenty-First Century’, International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research 7(3), 2013, p 258
42. Lemelin et al, ‘Conflicts, Battlefields, Indigenous Peoples and Tourism’, pp 264–266
43. Sharpley, ‘Introduction’, p 9
44. For further discussion of the relationship between postcolonial representations of tourism and dark or contrapuntal historical experiences
45. Anthony Carrigan, Postcolonial Tourism: Literature, Culture, and Environment, London: Routledge, 2011
46. Phaedra C Pezzullo, ‘“This Is the Only Tour That Sells”: Tourism, Disaster, and National Identity in New Orleans’, Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 7(2), 2009, pp 99–114
47. Bianca Freire-Medeiros, ‘The Favela and Its Touristic Transits’, Geoforum 40(4), 2009, pp 580–588
48. Manfred Rolfes, ‘Poverty Tourism: Theoretical Reflections and Empirical Findings Regarding an Extraordinary Form of Tourism’, GeoJournal 75(5), 2010, pp 421–442.
49. Bianca Freire-Medeiros, Touring Poverty, London: Routledge, 2013, p 168, for a possible distinction between dark tourism and what she calls ‘poverty tourism’, including slum tourism.
50. Sex tourism could also be considered under the rubric of dark tourism, not least as it is entangled with chronic poverty, entrenched exploitation, disturbed psychological motivations and in some cases experiences of disaster.
51. Copeland Stupart, ‘The Development of Dark/Cultural Heritage Attractions in Falmouth, Jamaica, West Indies’, PhD thesis, University of Waterloo, 2012.
52. Examples of recent scholarship that connect dark tourism to media and performance studies include Brian Creech, ‘The Spectacle of Past Violence: Travel Journalism and Dark Tourism’, in Folker Hanusch and Elfriede Fürsich (eds), Travel Journalism: Exploring Production, Impact and Culture, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp 249–265
53. Emma Willis, Theatricality, Dark Tourism and Ethical Spectatorship: Absent Others, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.