The Macau arraial: Portuguese heritage, serious games, and postcolonial identity in a Chinese tourist cityAmaro, Vanessa; Simpson, Tim
2024 Tourist Studies
doi: 10.1177/14687976241276308
This study examines the reinvention of Portugal’s traditional arraial festival in the postcolonial city of Macau. It assesses the transposition of the arraial’s cultural significance from a Portuguese summertime event to an innovative tourist attraction that integrates Portuguese colonial symbols with interactive augmented reality experiences in three historic Macau neighborhoods. The research draws on stakeholder interviews, ethnographic observations, and analysis of game content to scrutinize how this tourist festival forges Macau’s hybrid post-colonial identity through visitor virtual engagement with Portuguese heritage. While the arraial is unique among Macau’s tourist festivals for its emphasis on Portuguese culture, it sometimes sanitizes colonial events or perpetuates historical social divides under the premise of harmonious cultural fusion. The research offers insights into the dynamics of tourism in postcolonial regions, the impact of cultural festivals as tourist attractions, and the educational potential of gamification in conveying heritage.
Constructing extraordinary experience from everyday life: Zibo barbecue check-in vlogs’ digital narrativesGuo, Weiwen; Qiu, Liangwei
2024 Tourist Studies: An International Journal
doi: 10.1177/14687976241281777
Examining the intersection of check-in tourism and travel vlogs within the context of Zibo, China—a destination popularized on social media platforms for its barbecue culture—this study analyzes 24 check-in vlogs from Bilibili platform. Through the rite of passage theoretical lens, this work investigates how vloggers utilize digital storytelling to shape and construct destination narratives. The research reveals how tourists assert agency over space by integrating place, body, and narrative elements, contributing to an extraordinary tourist experience comprising liminal moments of ordinariness and authenticity, thereby effectively (re)writing Zibo as a welcoming city of barbecue and a slow-life destination. This investigation provides insights into the evolving dynamics of contemporary tourism influenced by social media practices, highlighting the transformative role of digital narratives in shaping tourist perceptions and experiences, as well as meaning-making processes.
“We’re no longer the senzala”: Race, space, and difference in the Ethnic Capital of BrazilMelville, Elizabeth
2024 Tourist Studies
doi: 10.1177/14687976241274817
Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Ijuí, a small rural city in Rio Grande do Sul, this work examines how history, race, and power over space articulate in the construction of a multiethnic heritage tourism festival. Ijuí has recently garnered significant national and international heritage recognition based on its unique history of multiethnic European colonization and the metanarrative that this produced an exceptionally tolerant and harmonious society. Contrasting with this narrative, the reality for the city’s Black, indigenous, and mixed residents reveals how tourism is often situated within a zone of ambivalence, serving both as an enduring source of precarity and a critical site of hope. Drawing from Michel De Certeau’s theories of strategies and tactics, along with Susan Gal and Judith Irvine’s work on rhematization, this article aims to (1) trace the precarity involved when colorblind multiethnic tourism operates within contexts of marked racial inequality, (2) interrogate the ideological, material, and semiotic processes by which these precarities become recursively inscribed within the space of tourism, and (3) show how the space of tourism can be reappropriated and utilized through tactics that defy categorization as tourism, serving ends that threaten the very basis of the precarities themselves. Thus, even as the multiethnic tourism landscape has been a source of ongoing marginalization, I argue in this work that it can also be reimagined as a space of potential where new communities, relations, visibilities, and histories can circulate and take root.
Defending against out-migration: Rural precarity, tourism, and hope in Quilotoa, EcuadorQuick, Joe R
2024 Tourist Studies
doi: 10.1177/14687976241296147
This article explores themes of precarity and hope through histories of tourism in Quilotoa, Ecuador. The initial embrace of tourism among Quilotoans in the late 1980s responded to prevailing conditions of precarity in the livelihoods of young migrant laborers from Quilotoa and other rural indigenous communities of the Ecuadorian highlands. The sense of hope that prevailed among Quilotoans by the mid 2010s was rooted in their collective management of tourism as a shared resource, and their shared feeling that tourism provided a bulwark against the intense pressure to migrate that was still felt by young people in neighboring communities. Yet the collapse of tourism in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the precarity of tourism itself, and many young Quilotoans have once again been forced to leave home in search of precarious wage labor opportunities. This article identifies how the ebbs and flows of hope, precarity, tourism, and labor migration are linked in Quilotoa, and how they are managed collectively by the Center for Community Tourism that oversees tourism there.
Belonging between precarity and hope: immigration, tourism, and violence in the Dominican RepublicKrause, Keegan C
2024 Tourist Studies
doi: 10.1177/14687976241264605
This article discusses the contemporary entanglements of a growing immigration-industrial complex and a mass international tourism project in the Dominican Republic. At this nexus, Haitian im/migrant labor, and the labor of policing it, are intricately connected to the tourism economy and facilitated via politics of belonging. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with young male-identifying Haitian and Dominican tourism workers in two coastal communities in the Dominican Republic, here I bring into focus the violence disproportionately faced by Haitian men and elucidate how experiences of belonging and exclusion interface with precarity and hope in a globalized marketplace that privileges the pleasure of international tourists.
Ethical ambivalence in postcolonial touristic encountersCho, Hyo Dan; Lee, Maria Younghee; Lim, Sang Taek
2024 Tourist Studies
doi: 10.1177/14687976241293511
This article aims to understand the ways in which tourists approach, negotiate and interpret a colonial past, memory and imaginary in the Bà Nà hills of Vietnam. Ethnographic research was undertaken from March to November 2019. By using ambivalence as an interpretive and analytic tool to elucidate the place of ethics from the postcolonial perspective, this article focused to reveal contradictory emotions, incompatible values and emotional internal clashes of tourists toward a colonial past. Findings show that tourists’ ethical ambivalence is located in-between ‘care of the self’ and ‘concern for the others’ and that such ethical ambivalence demonstrates tourists’ negotiation and articulation of their own needs and desires with those of other people by recognising the alterity of others.