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to as “Third World”' (Tucker and Akama, 2009: 513). However, as we argue below, critical
postcolonialism need not only be directed at the idea of the 'Third World', but also at the
hegemony of Western thought across space and place (including, as argued above, in how
space and place are understood as concepts).
Regarding the use of the postcolonial within tourism studies to refer to tourism's processes
of neocolonialism, it is generally argued that neocolonialism occurs in what has historically
been referred to as the 'periphery' or the 'South', whilst the agents of colonialism (or rather
tourists, corporations and capital) originate from within the 'centre' or the 'North' (Akama,
2004; Fisher, 2004). Spivak (1999) argues that neocolonialism refers not only to the physical
act of colonising territory but also to the role of the economy in creating new processes of
colonialism and domination over resources. Arguably, neocolonialism is attended to through
the traditional area of tourism 'impact' studies, although the postcolonial implies attendance
to the
ongoing
structures of imperial power within the contemporary world and as such high-
lights the problems of the past within the present.
Within the context of 'impact' studies of the neocolonial practices of tourism, research has
addressed the implications of global practices and ideologies being imposed upon the places and
peoples of tourism. For example, Sarmento (2009) explores an example of tourism as neocolo-
nial agent within the Cape Verde, an archipelago off the west coast of Africa which became a
key strategic site in the slave trade. The study looks at three tourist sites and how they 'partici-
pate in the erasure, maintenance and creation of memory, forging new ways of collective
identity' (Sarmento, 2009: 524). Sarmento argues that tourism plays an important role in proc-
esses whereby 'memories, past and present are rehabilitated by the powerful' (p. 540) in order
to construct 'a sweet and amnesic present out of a painful past' (ibid.). This, he claims, is a
political struggle, directly engaged or infl uenced by neoliberalism. Indeed, tourism's entangle-
ment with processes of neoliberalism illustrates the predominance of Western global discourses
in shaping the way in which people think about and represent their place(s) (see also Chang,
Chapter 17 i
n this volume). Hence, that which we may refer to as neocolonial is not a simplistic
binary relationship between a colonising authority and a colonised people, but is rather a
complex set of economic, socio-cultural and political relationships, the outcomes of which are
not easily judged as either positive or negative ( Jacobs, 1996; Royle, 2010).
Continuing consideration of the specifi cs of particular places, 'critical postcolonialism'
refers to a way of understanding how the colonised 'other' can subvert both the histories of
colonisation and also the continuing dominating discourse of Western ideas, particularly
through the performance of tourism (Tucker and Akama, 2009). In the fi rst instance, within
tourism this often refers to how colonised peoples can use tourism as an alternative form of
representation in order to achieve political work against the dominating colonial power
(Hollinshead, 2004). This subversion is important because tourism may be, as Tucker and
Akama (2009: 513) argue, 'an activity and indeed an industry that feeds off essentialisms and
myths'. This view of tourism is that it is a phenomenon which both creates and feeds Western
appetites for 'exotic' and 'authentic' cultures, and that these notions of the 'exotic' and the
'authentic' derive from histories of subject/object, self/other (colonial) discourses.
Discussions within tourism studies have described and critiqued these processes of image
and myth-making (Selwyn, 1996), and have more recently gone on to consider how these
myths and essentialisms might be subverted and undermined by the agents and participants of
tourism (Hollinshead, 2004; Tucker, 2009; Waitt
et al.
, 2007). For example, Tucker's (2009)
work on the emotion of shame in the tourist encounter illustrates the potential for a rethinking
of the relationship between the 'Western' tourist and the visited 'Other'. Recognition of
embodied performances, which include emotion, are considered in the way that they might
