Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
about the implications of immigration by the subjects of former colonised places to the 'home'
of the former colonial power.
First, then, the world of tourism is changing as increasing numbers of people from
'non-Western' countries (often former colonised sites) become tourists. Drawing upon the
example of Asian tourists, Winter (2009) claims that our understandings of tourism and
tourist are premised on thoughts based primarily within the Western academy. However, the
'traditional' fl ows of tourists which primarily originate from European and North American
countries are likely to be challenged by increasing mobility, particularly from Asian coun-
tries, notably India and China (Chan, 2006; Lee, 2003). Increasingly, people from these
countries become the 'new' tourists to the West. Just as postcolonial theory has been useful
in 'pluralising modernity' (Venn, 2006: 44), this clearly raises the need to pluralise the tourist
gaze (see Larsen
, Chapter 8
of this volume), to reconsider tourist expectations, perceptions
and motivations, indeed what it is to be a tourist (Lee, 2003). Furthermore, such postcolonial
thinking can then be used to inform our understandings of how new interactions and rela-
tionships are taking place in tourism destinations such as the northern European countries
(former colonial powers). As Winter (2009) asks, how do we account for potentially different
ways (other than Anglocentric) of thinking about the nature of engagement and perform-
ances with and in tourist sites? Also, what are these places supposed to provide for these 'new'
tourists? Indeed, engaging with postcolonial thinking, tourism geographies can provide a
forum for considering the very signifi cant role of tourism as a space from which culturally
different understandings of place emerge.
Connected with the above is the important area of 'diaspora tourism' (see also Timothy,
Chapter 20
of this volume). Until recently, the literature on diaspora and hybridity had
neglected tourism (Bruner, 2010), which is surprising given that migrants, refugees, exiles
and expatriates returning as tourists to their 'homeland' is a signifi cant area of travel. On this,
for example, Bruner (2010) considers the representations of slavery for African American
tourists 'returning' to Ghana. There are important links here with the work of Sarmento
(2009) cited above. Ali and Holden (2006) have examined the post-migration mobilities of a
UK Pakistani diaspora, fi nding that the 'myth of return' (the perpetual idea that their settle-
ment in the UK is only temporary) is crucial to understanding the meanings the Pakistani
community attaches to tourism motivations. Furthermore, they argue that an analysis of post-
migration tourism mobilities is helpful in gaining a better understanding of the ties between
the postcolonial diasporas and the homelands.
The issue of diaspora leads on to the second key future direction of research, one which
addresses the role of tourism as a way of enunciating belonging to places. Hollinshead (1998,
2004), for example, addresses the ways in which tourism helps to perform a politics of
belonging (focusing specifi cally on indigenous populations). Yet, given the increased move-
ment of people, and in particular the migration from former colonised countries to the former
coloniser countries, the enunciative role of tourism is not only an issue for the populations of
the former colonised and settler societies, but also for places now seeing a 'reverse colonisa-
tion'. On this, postcolonial theory can make a signifi cant contribution to tourism research by
throwing open to question and even disrupting traditional ideas of 'host' and 'guest'. Indeed,
within a discussion on hospitality, Laachir (2007) calls attention to the politics of immigration
in Europe. She notes that many European countries have failed to 'formulate a positive history
of the post-war immigration of their ex-colonial subjects' (2007: 186), and, as such, they have
perpetuated a colonial culture of what Young (1990, cited in Laachir, 2007: 186) refers to as
the 'empire within'. Yet, despite a politics of exclusion, these ex-colonial subject colonisers are
now very much a part of Europe. The cultures and religions which migrants have bought to
