Tourism Geopolitics: Assemblages of Infrastructure, Affect, and Imagination

Matilde Córdoba Azcárate (Editor)

with Mary Mostafanezhad (Editor), Roger Norum (Editor)

Citation

Mostafanezhad, M., Azcárate, M. C., & Norum, R. (Eds.). (2021). Tourism Geopolitics. University of Arizona Press. https://openresearchlibrary.org/content/95b3d803-aa65-4341-adf4-b80acabffa0d

Summary

By the start of the century, nearly one billion international travelers were circulating the globe annually, placing tourism among the worlds’ most ubiquitous geopolitical encounters. While the COVID-19 pandemic brought the industry to a sudden halt, its geopolitical significance remained. With striking clarity, tourism desires and reinvented mobilities revealed the impermanence of Old World orders as new global alliances were forged. While scholars have critically examined tourism in the contexts of development, cultural change, and environmental crisis, much less attention has been paid to the geopolitical drivers and consequences of the world’s largest industry. This collection homes in on tourism and its geopolitical entanglements by examining its contemporary affects, imaginaries, and infrastructures. It develops the concept of tourism geopolitics to reveal the growing centrality of tourism in geopolitical life, as well as the geopolitical nature of the tourism encounter.

In Tourism Geopolitics, contributors show enacted processes such as labor migration, conservation, securitization, nation building, territorial disputes, ethnic cleansing, heritage revitalization, and global health crisis management, among others. These contended societal processes are deployed through tourism development initiatives that mobilize deeply uneven symbolic and material landscapes. The chapters reveal how a range of experiences are implicated in this process: museum visits, walking tours, architectonical evocations of the past, road construction, militarized island imaginations, gendered cultural texts, and official silences. Collectively, the chapters offer ethnographically rich illustrations from around the world that demonstrate the critical nature of tourism in formal geopolitical practices, as well as the geopolitical nature of everyday tourism encounters. This volume is a vital read for critical geographers, anthropologists, and political scientists, as well as scholars of tourism and cultural studies.

Contributors: Sarah Becklake, M. Bianet Castellanos, Matilde Córdoba Azcárate, Jason Dittmer, Klaus Dodds, Jamie Gillen, Simon Halink, Jordan Hallbauer, James Igoe, Debbie Lisle, Mary Mostafanezhad, Dieter K. Müller, Roger Norum, Alessandro Rippa, Ian Rowen, Robert Saunders, Juan Francisco Salazar, Tani Sebro, Mimi Sheller, Henry Szadziewski, Vernadette Vicuña González, Emma Waterton

Redacted

Lilly Irani and Jesse Marx

Taller, California, 2021

Link: https://tallercalifornia.cargo.site/Libros

About

As involuntary art works, redacted documents visually state the limits between secrecy and public information. With a trenchant sense of irony, Marx and Irani analyze the many “styles” and “hands” of censorship, as revealed by a collection of public records from San Diego. Why are some public records requests denied? Why is some information revealed and other information redacted? What does public information mean for democracy, for trust in government and amongst ourselves? Redacted, a delightfully eclectic and playful combination of personal reflection, critical analysis, practical tips, and interviews, dives into the byzantine world of public records requests, a world of government redactors, lawyers, public officials, corporations, and citizens wrangling over the availability of information.

Shooting Cameras for Peace / Disparando Cámaras para la Paz

Youth, Photography, and the Colombian Armed Conflict / Juventud, Fotografía y el Conflicto Armado Colombiano

About

"The book is the capstone of a nineteen year process, including the founding of a Colombian non-profit that gave marginalized youth in the far outskirts of Colombia the opportunity to take their own photographs and tell their own stories.

The report entitled, “Zooming to the Border for Human Rights: A fact-finding report on the ongoing violations of human rights at the U.S.-Mexico Border” draws from a series of public Zoom panels in consultation with community groups working on issues pertaining to migration, labor and the environment on both sides of the border and along its full east- west extension from the Gulf Coast the the Pacific Ocean. Originally conceived as a face-to-face fact-finding trip , rather than canceling the project, we switched to a virtual format during the height of the pandemic. The report, therefore, also documents the added impact of COVID-19 the already dire and dismal conditions at the border as well as the valiant efforts in these border communities to meet this additional challenges.  In addition to working on the executive summary, Joe and I co-authored two chapters in the report.  

Stuck with Tourism: Space, Power, and Labor in Contemporary Yucatan

Matilde Córdoba Azcárate

University of California Press, 2020

Link: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520344495/stuck-with-tourism

Awarded

2020 Book Prize, Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology

2020 Nelson Graburn Book Prize at the American Anthropological Association, Anthropology of Tourism Interest Group

Abstract

Tourism has become one of the most powerful forces organizing the predatory geographies of late capitalism. It creates entangled futures of exploitation and dependence, extracting resources and labor, and eclipsing other ways of doing, living, and imagining life. And yet, tourism also creates jobs, encourages infrastructure development, and in many places inspires the only possibility of hope and well-being. Stuck with Tourism explores the ambivalent nature of tourism by drawing on ethnographic evidence from the Mexican Yucatán Peninsula, a region voraciously transformed by tourism development over the past forty years. Contrasting labor and lived experiences at the beach resorts of Cancún, protected natural enclaves along the Gulf coast, historical buildings of the colonial past, and maquilas for souvenir production in the Maya heartland, this book explores the moral, political, ecological, and everyday dilemmas that emerge when, as Yucatán’s inhabitants put it, people get stuck in tourism’s grip.

Download a flyer for this book which includes a discount from the publisher. 

Reviews

"This original ethnography offers a new theoretical perspective on tourism and its impact on local communities. Rather than accepting the received view that tourism benefits the inhabitants of a place, it takes a more critical perspective that uncovers how tourism restructures every aspect of the environment and the economy through its predatory and extractive practices."––Setha M. Low, Distinguished Professor of Environmental Psychology, Anthropology, Earth and Environmental Sciences, and Women's Studies, The Graduate Center, City University of New York

"Through deep ethnographic detail, Matilde Córdoba Azcárate captures the sensorial life that tourism's lopsided national economies and intercultural encounters bring to the Yucatán. She follows the labor that holds up the gamut of cosmopolitan, ecotouristic, and indigenous fantasy worlds engineered by tourist desire, updating Jamaica Kincaid's observations about the perverse gifts of tourism. Stuck with Tourism exposes the steep price tourism extracts from the men and women caught in it, as well as the struggles and dreams that sustain them."––Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, author of Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai'i and the Philippines

“Stuck with Tourism is an extremely compelling account of the spatial, cultural, and ecological impacts of tourism in the Yucatan region of Mexico, with implications far beyond. Córdoba Azcárate grounds her analysis in more than a decade of ethnographic immersion in sites representing beach resort tourism, nature tourism, cultural tourism, and a factory producing goods for the tourist market. She sensitively portrays how tourism geographies are predator, and how workers, regions, and nations get “stuck” with tourism as a developmental trap, even while holding out hope for better futures. Incorporating the latest theoretical literature on tourism in an accessible way, the book reorients the imagination of tourism as encounter toward a consideration of tourism’s crucial role in the production of space, scale, and mobilities in the face of ecological crisis.” ––Mimi Sheller, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy, Drexel University

About the Author

Dr. Matilde Córdoba Azcárate holds a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (2007), where she also received a B.A in Sociology (2001) , and a B.A and M.As in Social Anthropology (2003, 2005).

Prior to joining the Communication Department as a faculty member, Córdoba Azcárate has have worked as an Assistant Professor, Anthropology Department, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) (2007-2013); a Fulbright Post-doctoral Fellow at the Earth and Environmental Sciences Program and The Center for Place, Culture and Politics at The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY) (2010-2012); and more recently, as a Lecturer at the Department of Communication and a Research Fellow at The Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego (2013-2016).

Córdoba Azcárate's research has been funded by The Fulbright Postdoctoral Program (2010-12); The Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, University of Oxford (2010-2011); The National Plan for Research and Development, Ministry of Science and Innovation, Spain (2004-2008; 2008-2011; 2012-2015) and more recently, the UC San Diego’s Non-Senate Faculty Development Awards (2015; 2016).

Her teaching interests include critical globalization; cultural industries and consumer cultures; tourism as a social form; the ideology and production of nature; capitalism and its ecologies; ethnographic methods. Currently she is part of the editorial boards of Revista de Antropología Social, the Journal Transfers: an interdisciplinary journal on mobility studies, and Etnográfica.

Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum

Fernando Domínguez Rubio

Link: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo51203276.html

Awards

Association for the Study of Arts of the Present: ASAP Book Prize

ASA Culture Section: Mary Douglas Prize

Science, Knowledge, and Technology section, American Sociological Association: Robert K. Merton Award (Honorable Mention)

About

How do you keep the cracks in Starry Night from spreading? How do you prevent artworks made of hugs or candies from disappearing? How do you render a fading photograph eternal—or should you attempt it at all? These are some of the questions that conservators, curators, registrars, and exhibition designers dealing with contemporary art face on a daily basis. In Still Life, Fernando Domínguez Rubio delves into one of the most important museums of the world, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, to explore the day-to-day dilemmas that museum workers face when the immortal artworks that we see in the exhibition room reveal themselves to be slowly unfolding disasters.

Still Life offers a fascinating and detailed ethnographic account of what it takes to prevent these disasters from happening. Going behind the scenes at MoMA, Domínguez Rubio provides a rare view of the vast technological apparatus—from climatic infrastructures and storage facilities, to conservation labs and machine rooms—and teams of workers—from conservators and engineers to guards and couriers—who fight to hold artworks still.

As MoMA reopens after a massive expansion and rearranging of its space and collections, Still Life not only offers a much-needed account of the spaces, actors, and forms of labor traditionally left out of the main narratives of art, but it also offers a timely meditation on how far we, as a society, are willing to go to keep the things we value from disappearing into oblivion.

The Routledge History of American Sexuality

Kevin P. Murphy, Jason Ruiz, and David Serlin, eds.

New York and London: Routledge. 2020.

Link: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-History-of-American-Sexuality/Murphy-Ruiz-Serlin/p/book/9781138639355

About

The Routledge History of American Sexuality brings together contributions from leading scholars in history and related fields to provide a far-reaching but concrete history of sexuality in the United States.

This interdisciplinary group of authors explores a wide variety of case studies and concepts to provide an innovative approach to the history of sexual practices and identities over several centuries. Each chapter interrogates a provocative word or concept to reflect on the complex ideas, debates, and differences of historical and cultural opinions surrounding it. Authors challenge readers to look beyond contemporary identity-based movements in order to excavate the deeper histories of how people have sought sexual pleasure, power, and freedom in the Americas.

This book is an invaluable resource for students or scholars seeking to grasp current research on the history of sexuality and is a seminal text for undergraduate and graduate courses on American History, Sexuality Studies, Women’s Studies, Gender Studies, or LGBTQ Studies.

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