Tourism Geopolitics: Assemblages of Infrastructure, Affect, and Imagination

Tourism Geopolitics explores the geopolitical drivers and consequences of the world's largest industry, revealing the impermanence of Old World orders and the forging of new global alliances. It examines tourism's contemporary affects, imaginaries, and infrastructures, and develops the concept of tourism geopolitics to reveal the growing centrality of tourism in geopolitical life. The chapters offer ethnographically rich illustrations from around the world that demonstrate the critical nature of tourism in formal geopolitical practices and the geopolitical nature of everyday tourism encounters.

Format: Hardback
Length: 432 pages
Publication date: 08 June 2021
Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Tourism has become a global phenomenon, with nearly one billion international travelers circulating the globe annually. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought the industry to a sudden halt, highlighting its geopolitical significance. Tourism desires and reinvented mobilities have revealed the impermanence of Old World orders, as new global alliances are forged. While scholars have critically examined tourism in the contexts of development, cultural change, and environmental crisis, much less attention has been paid to the geopolitical drivers and consequences of the world's largest industry. This collection homes in on tourism and its geopolitical entanglements by examining its contemporary affects, imaginaries, and infrastructures. It develops the concept of tourism geopolitics to reveal the growing centrality of tourism in geopolitical life, as well as the geopolitical nature of the tourism encounter. Contributors show enacted processes such as labor migration, conservation, securitization, nation building, territorial disputes, ethnic cleansing, heritage revitalization, and global health crisis management, among others. These contended societal processes are deployed through tourism development initiatives that mobilize deeply uneven symbolic and material landscapes. The chapters reveal how a range of experiences are implicated in this process: museum visits, walking tours, architectural evocations of the past, road construction, militarized island imaginations, gendered cultural texts, and official silences. Collectively, the chapters offer ethnographically rich illustrations from around the world that demonstrate the critical nature of tourism in formal geopolitical practice.

Weight: 742g
Dimension: 161 x 236 x 33 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780816539307