Travel Reference
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Europe are rapidly transforming spaces and places. By way of example Chan (2005) illustrates
the gift of a Chinese pagoda to the city of Birmingham by a Chinese immigrant. Such 'gifts'
not only illustrate an act of hospitality within the 'new' home city, but can also be read as an
act of belonging-making by migrants as a way of becoming a part and a host of the places they
now call 'home'. Furthermore, such acts of belonging transform the space of cities for tourism
by creating very visual, emplaced markers of 'difference'. Yet, as Cook and Harrison (2003)
note, it is important to consider the inherent 'essentialisms' hidden in readings of such ethnic
spaces. In other words, these experiences may serve to reinforce the 'foreignness' or Otherness
of such diasporic communities (Bal, 2005). Important questions remain, therefore, regarding
the intricate complexities of contemporary tourism's enunciative value.
Conclusion
In terms of 'places' for study, then, we call here for consideration of the postcolonial within
all sites
of tourism regardless of their claim as a site of colonisation, including the places and
various touristic spaces of 'Europe' (the former colonial power). We have argued here that the
ways in which tourism is produced, performed and consumed everywhere have the potential
to enact a postcolonial reworking of identity and a disruption of colonial relationships.
Drawing again on Venn's (2006) argument regarding the future of postcolonial work quoted
in the introduction to this chapter, tourism
as postcolonialism
(Tucker and Akama, 2009)
should now begin the project of opening critical spaces for new narratives of identity and
belonging. With the new mobilities occurring, it is crucial to consider how the ways of
thinking and being (epistemologies and ontologies) which are the true legacies of colonialism
and Western imperialism are being contested through tourism within the new formations of
hybrid places, including Europe. What, we need to ask, do tourism performances do for
making sense of belonging and identity? Furthermore, how do tourists, including the 'new
tourists', accept and engage with non-traditional European performances performed by the
'new Europeans'? Working within an ethics of postcolonialism, also, we need to ask why are
or should certain voices be excluded? Attending to the dynamics of location within tourism
as well as the shifts and changes in patterns of tourism, then, illustrates the subversion of
subject/object, and colonised/coloniser, since those formerly labelled as the objects of tourism
become tourists themselves, thus calling into question traditional understandings of tourism.
Postcolonial futures within tourism studies therefore lie not only within a continual discus-
sion and disruption of the hegemony of Western thought in tourism, but also in the study of
and about tourism.
