Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
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FUTURE SPACES OF
Engagement with postcolonial thought has become a key component of critical geographies
(Gibson, 2009). More specifi cally, within tourism geographies postcolonial thinking has
underpinned analyses of the sites of tourism encounters as both spaces of ongoing colonialism
and in terms of their postcolonial potential (Hall and Tucker, 2004; Tucker and Akama,
2009). In particular, postcolonial theory has been used to critically address issues pertaining
to the representation of people and places through tourism.
To date, theories of postcolonialism have tended to explore space and place through an
engagement with the geographic locations that can be defi ned as having been at some time,
or that still are, locations of colonisation. In such places, tourism is often argued to be an
ongoing form of colonial domination, or neocolonialism (Tucker and Akama, 2009).
Increasingly, however, tourism research engages with postcolonialism not just as a way of
describing the processes of domination but also as a means to deconstruct the power imbal-
ances and processes and, as such, to consider ways in which tourism provides a space for
subverting representations and creating new hybrid spaces of being and becoming
(Hollinshead, 2004).
This chapter explores the nature of postcolonial scholarship fi rstly in relation to critical
geography and then within the context of tourism geographies. The chapter then lays out
some possible future directions for postcolonial thinking in tourism research, arguing that
research can and should address the enunciative spaces of tourism in relation to the changing
nature of places and the increased movement of people between places. Indeed, as Venn
argues, postcolonial work has already destabilised the supposed dualities of north-south,
centre-periphery, modern-traditional and developed-developing, and so what it should be
concerned with now is 'the underlying problem of opening critical spaces for new narratives
of becoming and emancipation' (Venn, 2006: 1).
Postcolonialism, space and place
Ashcroft
et al.
(2002) note three meanings of the term
postcolonial
. The fi rst refers to the deno-
tation of a state as either colonial or as an ex-colony (postcolonial). In its simplest form, then,
postcolonialism refers to the time after offi cial colonial rule ends in a particular place.
However, as many commentators have suggested, this linearity is problematic as it obscures
