Political Tourism And Its Texts

The concept of political tourism is new to cultural and postcolonial studies. Nonetheless, it is a concept with major implications for scholarship. Political Tourism and Its Texts looks at the writings of political tourists, travellers who seek solidarity with international political struggles. With reference to the travel writing of, among others, Nancy Cunard, W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, Ernesto Che Guevara, and Salman Rushdie, Maureen Moynagh demonstrates the ways in which political tourism can be a means of exploring the formation of transnational affiliations and commitments. Moynagh's aims are threefold. First, she looks at how these tourists create a sense of belonging to political struggles not their own and express their personal and political solidarity, despite the complexity of such cross-cultural relationships. Second, Moynagh analyses how these authors position their readers in relation to political movements, inviting a sense of responsibility for the struggles for social justice. Finally, the author situates key twentieth-century imperial struggles in relation to contemporary postcolonial and cultural studies theories of 'new' cosmopolitanism. Drawing on sociological, postcolonial, poststructuralist, and feminist theories, Political Tourism and Its Texts is at once an insightful study of modern writers and the causes that inspired them, and a call to address, with political urgency, contemporary neo-imperialism and the politics of global inequality.

Tourism, the world's largest industry, has created a variety of complex political problems, particularly in those countries where the primary attraction of tourism is its potential for accelerating development. The political dimensions that have encouraged tourism in the People's Republic of China, the Philippines, Thailand, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Nepal, and Bhutan are examined in Linda K. Richter's study, which is based on more than 250 interviews with government officials, travel industry representatives, and media officials. Richter concentrates on the reasons for using tourism to advance government policy objectives and on the many ways political and economic problems can frustrate tourism's contribution to national development. All too often, after the expensive infrastructure is developed, luxury goods imported, and lavish promotional efforts expended, nations are left disillusioned with the economic promise of tourism. Disappointing results are often complicated by a preoccupation with the lure of tourism and an underestimation of the industry's needs and of the political pressures of and on government officials. Encouraging an awareness of the political aspects of tourism, the author advocates greater involvement by social and political scientists in monitoring tourism policy, as well as a restructuring and redesigning of programs in this largest sector of international trade.

Tourism and Politics: Introduction -- Chapter 1: Democracy and Tourism: Exploring the Nature of an Inconsistent Relationship -- Section 1: Politics, Democracy and Organisations -- Chapter 2: Tourism as Political Platform: Residents' Perceptions of Tourism and Voting Behaviour -- Chapter 3: Privatisation during Market Economy Transformation as a Motor of Development -- Chapter 4: Group politics and tourism interest representation at the supranational level. Evidence from the European Union -- Chapter 5: The Politics of Exclusion? Japanese Cultural Reactions and the Government's Desire to Double Inbound Tourism -- Chapter 6: Taming Tourism: Indigenous Rights as a Check to Unbridled Tourism -- Chapter 7: Celebrating or Marketing the indigenous? International right organisations, national governments and tourism creation -- Chapter 8: The Politics of Institution Building and European Co-operation: reflections on an EC-TEMPUS project on Tourism and Culture in Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Chapter 9: Towards the Responsible Management of the Socio-Cultural Impact of Township Tourism -- Chapter 10: Hegemony, globalization and tourism policies in developing countries -- Chapter 11: The Politics of Tourism: Ethnic Chinese Spaces in Malaysia -- Chapter 12: Preparing Now for Tomorrow: The Future for Tourism in Scotland up to 2015 -- Chapter 13: Governing Tourism Monoculture: Mediterranean Mass Tourism Destinations and Governance Networks. -- Chapter 14: 'The MTV Europe Music Awards Edinburgh 03: Delivering Local Inclusion? -- Chapter 15: The Lost Gardens and Airport Expansion: Focalisation in Heritage Landscapes -- Section 3: Circulation, Flows and Security -- Chapter 16: The War is Over so Let the Games Begin -- Chapter 17: Hostile Meeting Grounds: Encounters between the Wretched of the Earth and the Tourist through Tourism and Terrorism in the 21st Century -- Chapter 18: Defending Voyuerism: Dark tourism and the problem of Global Security -- Chapter 19: Rethinking Globalization Theory in Tourism -- Chapter 20: The End of Tourism, the Beginning of Law?; Politics, democracy, and organisations -- Scapes, mobility and space -- Circulation, flows and security.

The importance of political boundaries in the development, function and flow of tourism cannot be overemphasized. In light of today's political transformations and processes of globalization, this book provides a systematic examination of the relationships between boundaries and tourism, and offers a basis upon which tourism can be better managed and researched in a geo-political context.

Why has political ecology been assigned so little attention in tourism studies, despite its broad and critical interrogation of environment and politics? As the first full-length treatment of a political ecology of tourism, the collection addresses this lacuna and calls for the further establishment of this emerging interdisciplinary subfield. Drawing on recent trends in geography, anthropology, and environmental and tourism studies, Political Ecology of Tourism: Communities, Power and the Environment employs a political ecology approach to the analysis of tourism through three interrelated themes: Communities and Power, Conservation and Control, and Development and Conflict. While geographically broad in scope—with chapters that span Central and South America to Africa, and South, Southeast, and East Asia to Europe and Greenland—the collection illustrates how tourism-related environmental challenges are shared across prodigious geographical distances, while also attending to the nuanced ways they materialize in local contexts and therefore demand the historically situated, place-based and multi-scalar approach of political ecology. This collection advances our understanding of the role of political, economic and environmental concerns in tourism practice. It offers readers a political ecology framework from which to address tourism-related issues and themes such as development, identity politics, environmental subjectivities, environmental degradation, land and resources conflict, and indigenous ecologies. Finally, the collection is bookended by a pair of essays from two of the most distinguished scholars working in the subfield: Rosaleen Duffy (foreword) and James Igoe (afterword). This collection will be valuable reading for scholars and practitioners alike who share a critical interest in the intersection of tourism, politics and the environment

This book studies travel writing produced by French authors between the two World Wars following visits to authoritarian regimes in Europe and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). It sheds new light on the phenomenon of French political travel in this period by considering the well-documented appeal of Soviet communism for French intellectuals alongside their interest in other radical regimes which have been much less studied: fascist Italy, the Iberian dictatorships and Nazi Germany. Through analyses of the travel writing produced as a result of such visits, the book gauges the appeal of these forms of authoritarianism for inter-war French intellectuals from a broad political spectrum. It examines not only those whose political sympathies with the extreme right or extreme left were already publicly known, but also non-aligned intellectuals who were interested in political models that offered an apparently radical alternative to the French Third Republic. This study shows how travel writing provided a space for reflection on the lessons France might learn from the radical political experiments of the inter-war years. It argues that such writing can usefully be read as a form of utopian thinking, distinguishing this from colloquial understandings of utopia as an ideal location. Utopianism is understood neither as a fantasy ungrounded in the real nor as a dangerously totalitarian ideal, but, in line with Karl Mannheim, Paul Ricœur, and Ruth Levitas, as a form of non-congruence with the real that it seeks to transcend. The utopianism of French political travel writing is seen to lie not in the attempt to portray the destination visited as utopia, but rather in the pursuit of a dialogue with radical political alterity.

Political economy, in its various guises and transfigurations, is a research philosophy that presents both social commentary and theoretical progress and is concerned with a number of different topics: politics, regulation and governance, production systems, social relations, inequality and development amongst many others. As a critical theory, political economy seeks to provide an understanding of societies – and of the structures and social relations that form them – in order to evoke social change toward more equitable conditions. Despite the early influence of critical development studies and political economy on tourism research, political economy has received relatively little attention in tourism research. Political Economy and Tourism the first volume to bring together different theoretical perspectives and discourse in political economy related to tourism. Written by leading scholars, the text is organised into three sequential Parts, linked by the principle that ‘the political’ and ‘the economic’ are intimately connected. Part one presents different approaches to political economy, including Marxist political economy, regulation, comparative political economy, commodity chain research and alternative political economies; Part two links key themes of political economy, such as class, gender, labour, development and consumption, to tourism; and Part three examines the political economy at various geographical scales and focuses on the outcomes and processes of the political act of planning and managing tourism production. This engaging volume provides insights and alternative critical perspectives on political economy theory to expand discussions of tourism development and policy in the future. Political Economy and Tourism is a valuable text for students, researchers and academics interested in Tourism and related disciplines.

Richly researched and engagingly written, Political Affairs of the Heart traces the emergence of female sentimental travel writing in late eighteenth-century Britain, and posits its centrality to women’s engagement with national and gender politics. This study examines four travel narratives written by women between 1774 and 1795, convincingly arguing that they effectively deploy the discourse of sensibility to engage with debates around Britain’s national identity during the French and American Revolutions. Van Netten Blimke contends that Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768)—which first introduced sentimental discourse to the travelogue—facilitated women’s gradual inclusion into this previously male-dominated genre, effectively paving the way for women to influence the country’s sociopolitical transformation. These four previously understudied works successfully combine eyewitness authority with the language of sensibility to mount impassioned interventions in their nation’s perception and practice of revolutionary politics, at a time when its national identity was most in flux.