Tours of non-arrival: the politics of escape in tourist practices
Date
2009-08-31T22:57:28Z
Authors
Bagelman, Caroline Patricia
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Abstract
The prevalent frame of 'tourism as vacation' explicitly implies that one vacates 'the familiar' and escapes to 'the foreign'. Discourses of escape, therefore, function on the assumption that a rather clean and uncomplicated rupture between the familiar and foreign takes place (an assumption not only informing conventional readings and practices of tourism, but also the modern logic of states and citizenship and modern thought more broadly). A failure to account for the effects of this escapist logic on both the performance and materialization of tourism, as well as the ways in which tourism has come to reflect profound political problematics endemic to modern thought, has produced a serious gap in 'critical tourism' literature. To contest this notion of rupture, or, to disrupt escape, requires what Judith Butler terms a ‘radical re-articulation’ of tourism. In hopes to excite such a disruption, my work draws on Jacques Derrida’s texts concerning ‘non-arrival’ and ultimately re-articulates tourism as a practice of everyday life.
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Political theory, Politics of tourism, Escapist discourses, Non-arrival, Tourist gaze, Critical tourism