The seminar entitled “(Post)colonial Tourism in the English-Speaking Worlds” will be taught in English and is open to all students interested in tourism, its development and stakes, particularly in the English-speaking worlds (19th-21stcenturies).
Tourism has become a central issue in anthropology, sociology, geography, economics, history, in social sciences more generally. It is also of great concern for (post)colonial writers. The multidisciplinary approach to tourism we will adopt is of interest to LEA students. This course will be an opportunity to explore the lasting legacies of colonialism in the 20thand 21st centuries through the prism of tourism. Through concrete examples taken from press articles, visual documents of all kinds, but above all from literary texts written by (post)colonial Anglophone writers, we will delve into the power dynamics and cultural encounters at stake underlying tourism in some places that are perceived, by many Westerners, as “exotic” (a word that can be seen as very problematic, as we will see, and that we will have to deconstruct through such concepts as Edward Said’s “orientalism”).
We will have the opportunity to delve into anti-tourism sentiment among (post)colonial writers like Antiguan-American writer Jamaica Kincaid, Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott, Australian Indigenous writer Alexis Wright, Tanzanian-born British writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih, Indian writer Arundhati Roy, Trinidadian-born British writer V. S. Naipaul, and others. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach to tourism studies, we will wonder about the ways in which tourism studies can help us understand the (post)colonial experience, can help us reflect upon several aspects:
Tourism economic, social, environmental, and cultural impacts
Tourism and culture: the interruption of traditional cultures and creation of power imbalances
Exploitation and Objectification (among this, sexual exploitation)? Mass tourism = (post)colonialism?
The relationship between locals and tourists in the documents studied in class
The exploitation of local resources
Towards more positive tourism futures? Are more sustainable and more ethically-acceptable practices possible? If so, which ones?
CARRIGAN, A. (2011). Postcolonial Tourism: Literature, Culture, and Environment,
HALL, C. M., and TUCKER, H. (2004). “Tourism and Postcolonialism: An Introduction”, in C. M HALL and H. TUCKER (eds.), Tourism and Postcolonialism: Contested Discourses, Identities and Representations, London and New York: Routledge, 1-24.
SAID, E. Orientalism, London: Vintage, 1978.
- 教師: Courtois Cédric