This book is a response to the burgeoning interest in cultural tourism and the associated need for a coherently theorized approach for understanding the practices that such an interest creates. Cultural tourism has become an important and popular aspect of contemporary tourism studies, as well as providing a rich seam of upscale product development opportunities in the industry as a whole. Much of the related literature, however, focuses upon describing and categorizing cultural tourism from a supply-side perspective. This has prompted the taxonomizing of cultural tourists on the basis of their level of involvement and interest in cultural tourism products and/or their economic worth as a sought after market segment. There have been few recent attempts at a rigorous re-theorization of the issues beyond conventional representational theories; this book aims to fill that void. This groundbreaking volume provides a theoretical and empirical account of what it means to be a cultural or heritage tourist. It achieves this by exploring the interactions of people with places, spaces, intangible heritage and ways of life, not as linear alignments but as seductive ‘moments’ of encounter, engagement, performance and meaning-making, which are constitutive of cultural experience in its broadest sense. The book further explores encounters in cultural tourism as events that capture and constitute important social relations involving power and authority, self-consciousness and social position, gender and space, history and the present. It also explores the consequences these insights have for our understanding of culture and heritage and its management in the context of tourist activity. In capturing the ‘cultural moment’, this book provides a better understanding of the motivations, on-site activities, meaning constructions and other cultural work done by both tourists and tourist operators. The volume confronts and explores the cultural, political and economical interrelations between culture, heritage and the tourism industry. In so doing, it also investigates how this co-mingling of identity, representation and social life may be better apprehended with the wider shift in critical thought towards notions of affect and performativity. The book is a fundamental and influential contribution to research in this field. It will be of significant value to students, academics and researchers interested in this broad topic area.

At the interface between culture and tourism lies a series of deep and challenging issues relating to how we deal with issues of political engagement, social justice, economic change, belonging, identity and meaning. This book introduces researchers, students and practitioners to a range of interesting and complex debates regarding the political and social implications of cultural tourism in a changing world. Concise and thematic theoretical sections provide the framework for a range of case studies, which contextualise and exemplify the issues raised. The book focuses on both traditional and popular culture, and explores some of the tensions between cultural preservation and social transformation. The book is divided into thematic sections - Politics and Policy; Community Participation and Empowerment; Authenticity and Commodification; and Interpretation and Representation - and will be of interest to all who wish to understand how cultural tourism continues to evolve as a focal point for understanding a changing world.

Focusing on the formative influence of the works of John Ruskin in defining and developing cultural tourism, this book describes and assesses their effects on the tourist gaze (where to go and what to see, and how to see it) as directed at landscape, scenery, architecture and townscape, from the early Victorian period onwards.

With the question, "What does it mean to show?", the author explores the agency of display in museums and tourist attractions. She looks at how objects are made to perform their meaning by being collected and how techniques of display, not just the things shown, convey a powerful message.

A fascinating journey through the origins of American tourism In the early nineteenth century, thanks to a booming transportation industry, Americans began to journey away from home simply for the sake of traveling, giving rise to a new cultural phenomenon —the tourist. In Selling the Sights, Will B. Mackintosh describes the origins and cultural significance of this new type of traveler and the moment in time when the emerging American market economy began to reshape the availability of geographical knowledge, the material conditions of travel, and the variety of destinations that sought to profit from visitors with money to spend. Entrepreneurs began to transform the critical steps of travel—deciding where to go and how to get there—into commodities that could be produced in volume and sold to a marketplace of consumers. The identities of Americans prosperous enough to afford such commodities were fundamentally changed as they came to define themselves through the consumption of experiences. Mackintosh ultimately demonstrates that the cultural values and market forces surrounding tourism in the early nineteenth century continue to shape our experience of travel to this day.

This book is a fast-paced and thorough re-evaluation of what heritage tourism means to the people who experience it. It draws on contemporary thinking in human geography and heritage studies, and applies it to a sector of tourism that is both pervasive yet poorly researched in terms of the perspective of tourists themselves. In a series of lucid and tightly argued chapters, it traces the use of semiotics as an analytical tool from its theoretical origins in text, through the all-important dynamics of visuality into an expanded realm of feeling and sensuality. Challenging assumptions about the way that heritage is experienced, this book uses examples from around the world to explore the semiotic landscape that surrounds heritage sites, linking what is represented about the past and how it feels to be there.

Urban regeneration is often regarded as the process of renewal or redevelopment of spaces and places. There is a need to look at tourism and urban regeneration with a particular focus on cultural heritage. Cultural heritage consists of tangible heritage (such as historic buildings) and intangible heritage (such as events). The wider need and impact for such work is that places plan for change to keep up with the shifts in demand in the global economy in order for places to maintain a competitive advantage. Moreover, places need to keep up with the pace of global change or they risk stagnation and decline as increased competition is resulting in increased opportunities and choice for consumers. Each chapter in this book explores a specific form of cultural heritage that is driving change in urban spaces. Intended for a wide readership, the book will appeal to students of urban studies, human geography, heritage studies and international tourism management, as well as experts conducting research in and across these areas.

The complex relationship between heritage places and people, in the broadest sense, can be considered dialogic, a communicative act that has implications for both sides of the ‘conversation’. This is the starting point for Heritage and Tourism . However, the ‘dialogue’ between visitors and heritage sites is complex. ‘Visitors’ have, for many decades, become synonymous with ‘tourists’ and the tourism industry and so the dialogic relationship between heritage place and tourists has produced a powerful critique of this often contested relationship. Further, at the heart of the dialogic relationship between heritage places and people is the individual experience of heritage where generalities give way to particularities of geography, place and culture, where anxieties about the past and the future mark heritage places as sites of contestation, sites of silences, sites rendered political and ideological, sites powerfully intertwined with representation, sites of the imaginary and the imagined. Under the aegis of the term ‘dialogues’ the heritage/tourism interaction is reconsidered in ways that encourage reflection about the various communicative acts between heritage places and their visitors and the ways these are currently theorized, so as to either step beyond – where possible – the ontological distinctions between heritage places and tourists or to re-imagine the dialogue or both. Heritage and Tourism is thus an important contribution to understanding the complex relationship between heritage and tourism.

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.