Consuming colonial imaginaries and forging postcolonial networks: on the road with Indian travellers in the 1950s

Abstract

Drawing on an extended road trip from England to India undertaken by two Indian travellers in the 1950s, this paper challenges the dominant travel stories and Eurocentric academic accounts that persistently privilege western tourists. Focusing upon the literary desires that shaped their British itinerary and a dramatic encounter in Egypt, we highlight two distinctly different experiences that emerged during their journey. We demonstrate how a swirl of larger historical events and processes marked the time in which they travelled, with the encounters, places and incidents they experienced informed by the dissipation of colonial alliances and the emergence of postcolonial connections.

Chineseness and behavioural complexity: rethinking Chinese tourist gaze studies

“…To some extent, broader cultural transformations, along with changes in social norms as well as the canon of social taste(s), likely result in an alteration of the nature of the gaze (Hollinshead, 1999). Nevertheless, for many, Urry’s contention is still assumed to be deeply rooted in Western societies (Yang et al , 2013; Edensor and Kothari, 2018), and it neither manifests nor can directly be used to explain the alternative experiences and practices of non-Western tourists (Winter, 2009; Li, 2008; Pearce et al , 2013; Li et al , 2019). For this reason, the tourist gaze in China has also experienced a so-called “localisation” process (Xie et al , 2021, p. 213–231), in which this Western theoretical model is deliberately transformed and even re-constructed to encapsulate the specialties of tourism development and tourists’ gazes and visual practices in this nation.…”