Due to its centrality to the processes of transnational mobilities, migration and globalization, tourism studies has the potential to make a significant contribution to understanding the postcolonial experience. Drawing together theoretical and applied research, this fascinating book illuminates the links between tourism, colonialism and postcolonialism. Significantly, it creates a space for the voices of authors from postcolonial countries. Chapters are integrated and examined through concepts taken from the wider postcolonial literature, which identify tourism not only as an international industry but also as a postcolonial cultural form, which by its very nature is based on past and present day colonial structural relationships. The first book to explicitly explore the contribution tourism can make to the postcolonial experience, this book is an essential read for students of tourism, cultural studies and geography.

Carrigan here examines the aesthetic portrayal of tourism in postcolonial literatures. Looking at the cultural and ecological effects of mass tourism development in states that are still grappling with the legacies of 'western' colonialism, he argues that postcolonial writers provide blueprints toward sustainable tourism futures.

Illustrated by interviews with women and men in the tourist resorts in the Sinai, Egypt, this book opens up the debate surrounding sex tourism by examining the way in which holiday romances between western women and 'native' men are linked to a much wider romanticism of place and people, which is used to sell these destinations. The work provides insights into gender issues to do with globalization, travel and sexuality.

Angkor, Cambodia’s only World Heritage Site, is enduring one of the most crucial, turbulent periods in its twelve hundred year history. Given Cambodia’s need to restore its shattered social and physical infrastructures after decades of violent conflict, and with tourism to Angkor increasing by a staggering 10,000 per cent in just over a decade, the site has become an intense focal point of competing agendas. Angkor’s immense historical importance, along with its global prestige, has led to an unprecedented influx of aid, with over twenty countries together donating millions of dollars for conservation and research. For the Royal Government however, Angkor has become a ‘cash-cow’ of development. Post-conflict Heritage, Postcolonial Tourism critically examines this situation and locates Angkor within the broader contexts of post-conflict reconstruction, nation building, and socio-economic rehabilitation. Based on two years of fieldwork, the book explores culture, development, the politics of space, and the relationship between consumption, memory and identity to reveal the aspirations and tensions, anxieties and paradoxical agendas, which form around a heritage tourism landscape in a post-conflict, postcolonial society. With the situation in Cambodia examined as a stark example of a phenomenon common to many countries attempting to recover after periods of war or political turmoil, Post-conflict Heritage, Postcolonial Tourism will be of particular interest to students and scholars working in the fields of Asian studies, tourism, heritage, development, and cultural and postcolonial studies.

This book focuses on perspectives from and on the global south, providing fresh data and analyses on languages in African, Caribbean, Middle-Eastern and Asian tourism contexts. It provides a critical perspective on tourism in postcolonial and neocolonial settings, explored through in-depth case studies. The volume offers a multifaceted view on how language commodifies, and is commodified in, tourism settings and considers language practices and discourse as a way of constructing identities, boundaries and places. It also reflects on academic practice and economic dynamics in a field that is characterised by social inequalities and injustice, and tourism as the world's largest industry enacting dynamic communicative, social and cultural transformations. The book will appeal to both undergraduate and postgraduate students of tourism studies, linguistics, literature, cultural history and anthropology, as well as researchers and professionals in these fields.

Drawing together theoretical and applied research, this fascinating book illuminates the links between tourism, colonialism and postcolonialism. Significantly, it creates a space for the voices of authors from postcolonial countries.

This unique book examines the vital and contested connections between colonialism and tourism, which are as lively and charged today as ever before. Demonstrating how much of the marketing of these destinations represents the constant renewal of colonialism in the tourism business, this book illustrates how actors in the worldwide tourism industry continue to benefit from the colonial roots of globalisation.

Postcolonial Nations, Islands, and Tourism examines how real and literary islands have helped to shape the idea of the nation in a postcolonial world. Through an analysis of a variety of texts ranging from literature to prison correspondence to tourist questionnaires it exposes the ways in which nationalism relies on fictions of insularity and intactness, which the island and island tourism appear to provide. The island space seems to offer the ideal replica of the nation, and tourist practices promise the liberation of leisure, the gaze, and mobility. However, the very reliance on the constantly shifting and eroding island form exposes an anxiety about boundaries and limits on the part of the postcolonial nation. In appropriating island tourism, the new nation tends to recapitulate the failures and crises of the colonial nation before it. Starting with the first literary tourist, Robinson Crusoe, Postcolonial Nations, Islands, and Tourism goes on to show how authors such as JM Coetzee, Romesh Gunesekera, and Julian Barnes have explored the outlines and implications of islandness. It argues that each text expresses a profound discomfort with national form by undoing the form of the island through a variety of narrative strategies and rhetorical manoeuvres. By throwing the category of the island into crisis, these texts let uncertainties about the postcolonial nation and its violent practices emerge as doubt in the narratives themselves. Finally, in its selection of texts that shuttle between South Africa, Great Britain, and Sri Lanka, equalizing the former colonial metropole and its outposts, it offers an alternative disciplinary mapping of current postcolonial writing.

A brilliant look at colonialism and its effects in Antigua--by the author of Annie John "If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what you will see. If you come by aeroplane, you will land at the V. C. Bird International Airport. Vere Cornwall (V. C.) Bird is the Prime Minister of Antigua. You may be the sort of tourist who would wonder why a Prime Minister would want an airport named after him--why not a school, why not a hospital, why not some great public monument. You are a tourist and you have not yet seen . . ." So begins Jamaica Kincaid's expansive essay, which shows us what we have not yet seen of the ten-by-twelve-mile island in the British West Indies where she grew up. Lyrical, sardonic, and forthright by turns, in a Swiftian mode, A Small Place cannot help but amplify our vision of one small place and all that it signifies.

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.