Tourism And Memory

This book addresses the interconnected issues of public memory, race, and heritage tourism, exploring the ways in which historical tourism shapes collective understandings of America's earliest engagements with race. It includes contributions from a diverse group of humanities scholars, including early Americanists, and scholars from communication, English, museum studies, historic preservation, art and architecture, Native American studies, and history. Through eight chapters, the collection offers varied perspectives and original analyses of memory-making and re-making through travel to early American sites, bringing needed attention to the considerable role that tourism plays in producing--and possibly unsettling--racialized memories about America's past. The book is an interdisciplinary effort that analyses lesser-known sites of historical and racial significance throughout North America and the Caribbean (up to about 1830) to unpack the relationship between leisure travel, processes of collective remembering or forgetting, and the connections of tourist sites to colonialism, slavery, genocide, and oppression. Public Memory, Race, and Heritage Tourism of Early America provides a deconstruction of the touristic experience with racism, slavery, and the Indigenous experience in America that will appeal to students and academics in the social sciences and humanities.

This book considers tourism to memorial sites from a visitor’s point of view, challenging established theories in tourism and memory studies by critically appraising Germany’s often celebrated memory culture. Based on visitor observations and exit interviews, this book examines how domestic and international visitors negotiate their visits to the concentration camp memorials Ravensbrück and Flossenbürg, the House of the Wannsee Conference and the former Stasi prison Bautzen II. It argues that memorial sites are melting pots where family, national and global narratives meet. For German visitors, the visit to memorial sites is a confrontation with Germany's responsibility for the two dictatorships while for international visitors it can be a form of 'seeing is believing'. Ultimately, it is the immediacy of the space that is the most important part of the visit. Rooted in an interdisciplinary approach, this book will be of interest to academics and students in German Studies, Tourism and Heritage Studies, Museum Studies, Public History, and Memory Studies.

This book investigates ‘home’ and ‘homeland’ as destinations of touristic journeys and adds to recent scholarly interest in the intersection between tourism and migration. It covers the temporary visits and journeys in search of home and homelands by migrants, displaced people, exiles and diasporic communities in a wide range of different geographical and historical contexts. Personal and collective forms of memory are shown to play a key role in the motivation for, and experience of, such journeys. The volume contributes to the investigation of the tourism–memory nexus as it conceptualizes memory as underpinning touristic mobility, experience and performativity. Based on ethnographic case studies and other types of qualitative empirical research, the chapters of this book foreground individual touristic experiences, emotions, memories, perceptions, the search for identity and a sense of belonging. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of tourism, heritage, anthropology, identity studies, memory studies and migration/diaspora studies.

The examination of social memory and heritage tourism has grown considerably over the past few decades as scholars have critically re-examined the relationships between past memories and present actions at international, national, and local scales. Methodological innovation and reflection have accompanied theoretical advances as researchers strive to understand representations, experiences, thoughts, emotions and identities of the various actors involved in the reproduction of social memory and heritage landscapes. Social Memory and Heritage Tourism Methodologies describes and demonstrates innovations – including qualitative, quantitative, and mixed method approaches – for analysing the process and politics of remembering and touring the past through place. An introductory chapter looks at the history of social memory and heritage tourism research and the particular challenges posed by these fields of study. In subsequent chapters, the reader is lead through the varying methodologies employed by presenting them in the context of an in-depth case study from range of geographical locations. The resulting volume showcases innovative research in social memory and heritage tourism and provides the reader with insights into how they can successfully conduct their own research while avoiding common pitfalls. This title will be useful reading for scholars, professionals and students in tourism, geography, anthropology and museum studies who are preparing to conduct research on the reproduction of social memory in particular landscapes and places or are interested in investigating heritage tourism practices and representations.

Migration and forcible displacement are growing and impactful dynamics of the current global age. These processes generate mobility flows, travel patterns and touristic behaviour driven by personal and collective memories. The chapters in this book highlight the importance of travel and tourism for enabling such memories and memory-based identity practices to unfold. This book investigates how diasporic communities, transnational migrants, refugees and the internally displaced recreate home in their host place of residence through material culture, performativity and social relations; and how involuntary tangible and intangible stimuli evoke memories of home. It explores an array of diverse geographical contexts, balancing ethnographic vignettes of contemporary migrant societies with archival research providing historical accounts that reach back more than a century. Memory, Migration and Travel makes an original contribution by linking the emergent field of memory studies to the disciplines of tourism and migration/diaspora studies, and will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of tourism, geography, migration/diaspora studies, anthropology and sociology.

DIVStudy of how the memorials created in Oklahoma City and at the World Trade Center site raise questions about the relationship between cultural memory and consumerism./div

Most of the narratives packaged for New Orleans's many tourists cultivate a desire for black culture—jazz, cuisine, dance—while simultaneously targeting black people and their communities as sources and sites of political, social, and natural disaster. In this timely book, the Americanist and New Orleans native Lynnell L. Thomas delves into the relationship between tourism, cultural production, and racial politics. She carefully interprets the racial narratives embedded in tourism websites, travel guides, business periodicals, and newspapers; the thoughts of tour guides and owners; and the stories told on bus and walking tours as they were conducted both before and after Katrina. She describes how, with varying degrees of success, African American tour guides, tour owners, and tourism industry officials have used their own black heritage tours and tourism-focused businesses to challenge exclusionary tourist representations. Taking readers from the Lower Ninth Ward to the White House, Thomas highlights the ways that popular culture and public policy converge to create a mythology of racial harmony that masks a long history of racial inequality and structural inequity.

"Prison: Cultural Memory and Dark Tourism discusses decommissioned Australian prisons currently or potentially functioning as tourist attractions. In particular, it addresses a fundamental question: Do the interpretations and presentations of the sites include and fairly represent the personal stories and experiences associated with those prisons? The author argues that the conventional understanding of most of Australia's historical prisons fosters a radical "othering" of inmates, and with it the exclusion, distortion and historical neglect of their narratives." "This book examines avenues via which neglected narratives may be glimpsed or inferred, presenting a number of examples. This remedies the imbalance in some degree - and tests such avenues' potential as resources for inclusive interpretations by public historians and curators. The book also focuses on the influence of "celebrity prisoners", whose links to the penal system are exploited as promotional features by the sites and in some cases by the individuals themselves. Their narratives provide broad, if unwitting, support for the system and for the othering of the more general inmate population." "The ramifications of the above with regard to aspects of Australian identity mean that certain facets of the "Australian character" traditionally held to be emblematic are affected. These effects have subtle but tangible consequences for modern Australians' collective memory and deleterious consequences for current popular attitudes to penal practice."--BOOK JACKET.