Race and critical tourism studies: An analytical literature review

Abstract

This analytical literature review focuses on critical tourism studies and its intersections with racial analyses. The tourism industry has long relied on desires to experience a sense of Otherness to generate economic growth, which makes race a valuable heuristic site to consider ways culture and economy are intertwined in the global marketplace. Two theories of race-Omi and Winant's (1986) racial formation and Goldberg's (2009) racial neoliberalism-are offered as avenues through that scholars might better investigate intersections of race and tourism. Race is commodified in tourism through orienting the concept around loci of value, and different types of tourism feature more racial prominence than others. Critical tourism scholars may benefit from an increased racial awareness in their work towards providing a counternarrative to strictly business-based tourism research. Meanwhile, race scholars might benefit from an increased understanding of ways racial difference operates within tourism, as it is a major site of negotiations of Otherness. Although racial themes are more prevalent in some types of tourism than others, the two theories provided together force us to consider ways that tourism studies might further racialize its critical inquiries.

Are we all in this together? Gender intersectionality and sustainable tourism

“…I argue that this erasure of Black women as agentic subjects and the way they are (re)presented as disempowered has implications for the development of tourism that seeks to be sustainable. This is because of the importance of women (Ferguson & Alarcón, 2015) and of race (Jamerson, 2016) to tourism.…”

“…Most have also been focused on the sex tourist as a Western (white) male and fewer have acknowledged the centrality of Western (white) women as sex tourists (but see Herold, Garcia, & DeMoya, 2001;Jeffreys, 2003;Pruitt & LaFont, 1995: Sanchez Taylor, 2006. Jamerson (2016) Heading South is directed by a white Frenchman Lauren Cantet and I suggest that as such, the story of the film is filtered through a white, heterosexual male gaze. The ubiquitous concept of the 'tourist gaze' coined by John Urry (1990), simply put, refers to the power and authority that Western tourists have over the people and places that they visit.…”

“…There are a few exceptions -Henry (2019) argues for the use of CRT to understand 'the cultural politics of racism in the volunteer tourism encounter ' (p. 326). He went on to suggest that volunteer tourism is a 'manifestation of contemporary whiteness' (Henry, 2019, p. 327); Jamerson (2016) draws on theories of racial formation and racial neoliberalism to highlight the link between culture and economics in tourism and suggests that racial difference has value and is an important asset in tourism; Dillette, Benjamin & Carpenter (2019) use CRT explicitly to reveal the critical role that understanding the Black travel experience can play in learning about race in tourism; Bright, Foster, Joyner & Tanny (2020) also draw on the logics of CRT to examine roadside markers in Tennessee in terms of whether they depict 'just representations' of the past. Torabian & Miller (2017), while not explicitly citing CRT are nevertheless inspired by its precepts in their discussion of the impact of race and nationality on freedom of movement in tourism.…”

“…In this paper I focus on the intersection between gender and race and contend that this has been neglected in studies of sustainable tourism. Gender has been extensively discussed in tourism studies (Ferguson & Alarcón, 2015;Figueroa-Domecq, Kimbu, de Jong & Williams, 2020;) and there are also several publications which focus on race ( (Boukhris, 2017;Jamerson, 2016).…”

Global tourism and local ethnicity: Reconfiguring racial and ethnic relations in central Laos

“…In this sense, the focus on ethnicity in the context of tourism has been largely about how tourism brings changes to locally bounded ethnicity, such as through the commodification of indigenous ethnic cultures and pressures on local people to display and perform "authenticity" to outsiders (see Adams, 2016;Oakes, 1998;Zhihong, 2007). Because the impact of foreign tourists on local peoples has been one of the central themes of tourism research, the existing literature tends to focus on outsider/insider relationships between global tourists and local ethnic groups (see Gmelch, 2012;Jamerson, 2016). In contrast, the ways in which global tourism reconfigures inter-ethnic relations among local peoples themselves in multi-ethnic societies are largely missing, with a few exceptions (e.g.…”