Spectacle, tourism and the performance of everyday geopolitics

Abstract

In recent years scholars have explored the geopolitics of spectacle in exciting ways. While tourism presents a rich opportunity to think about the intersection of geopolitics and spectacle, only a small but growing number of researchers have explored this area where state-society relations unfold in complex ways. This article draws on this work and other traditions in feminist political geography and non-representational theories to explore the embodied geopolitics of a festival and its tourist landscape in the city of Chiang Mai in northern Thailand. As such, we glimpse a complex set of geopolitical relations at play in the multiple spaces of the Yii Peng Festival. A closer look at the Festival with the theoretical tools proposed here helps reveal ongoing geopolitical forces that shape its many contours, including a multiplicity of difference.

Museum as geopolitical entity: Toward soft combat

“…This stands out to us today, as much research since has moved in the opposite direction: understanding the politics of museums and other tourism/heritage/leisure sites requires an engagement with the affective and emotional aspects of their materiality. In addition to Waterton and Dittmer (2014) cited above, others like Dowler (2013), Lisle (2016) and Miller and Del Casino (2018, 2020) have put forward an approach to the geopolitics of tourism that explores this exact intersection, where the affective and emotional become the prime site of intervention by the state or other political forces (also see Mostafanezhad, 2018; Rowen, 2016).…”