Claudio Minca

Tim Oakes

Over the past decade, tourism studies has broken out of its traditional institutional affiliation with business and management programs to take its legitimate place as an interdisciplinary social science field of cutting edge scholarship. The field has emerged as central to ongoing debates in social theory concerning such diverse topics as postcolonialism, mobility, and postmodernism, to name just a few. While there has been a diverse body of empirical research on this transformation the theoretical discussions in tourism studies remain largely attached to theories of modernity and Anglo-centric assumptions about tourism. There is a need for the field to come to terms theoretically with the contemporary and future realities of tourism as a truly global phenomenon. Real Tourism is a significant volume which sets this new theoretical agenda, engaging directly with what tourism does in practice and in place and demonstrates the need for a theoretical intervention that moves tourism scholarship beyond the province of Anglophone thinking. The volume achieves this by explicitly bridging ‘western’ and ‘non-western’ scholarship on tourism; reframing theoretical discussions around ‘real practices’ instead of abstract typologies; and radically delinking tourism theory from the grand narratives of modernity and assumptions about authenticity, identity, tradition, and development. The book brings together leading academics in the field and provides provocative multidisciplinary and multi-contextual reflection on the future of tourism. This original, timely and compelling volume puts forward new post modernist ideas and arguments about tourism today and in the future. It is essential reading for students, researchers and academics interested in Tourism.

Practice, Care, and Politics in Contemporary Travel Culture

Real Tourism

June Wang

Yang Yang

This book examines the vast and largely uncharted world of cultural/creative city-making in Asia. It explores the establishment of policy models and practices against the backdrop of a globalizing world, and considers the dynamic relationship between powerful actors and resources that impact Asian cities. Making Cultural Cities in Asia approaches this dynamic process through the lens of assemblage: how the policy models of cultural/creative cities have been extracted from the flow of ideas, and how re-invented versions have been assembled, territorialized, and exported. This approach reveals a spectrum between globally circulating ideals on the one hand, and the place-based contexts and contingencies on the other. At one end of the spectrum, this book features chapters on policy mobility, in particular the political construction of the "web" of communication and the restructuring or rescaling of the state. At the other end, chapters examine the increasingly fragmented social forces, their changing roles in the process, and their negotiations, alignments, and resistances. This book will be of interest to researchers and policy-makers concerned with cultural and urban studies, creative industries and Asian studies.

Mobility, assemblage, and the politics of aspirational urbanism

Making Cultural Cities in Asia

This book explores how the experience of modernization is revealed in China's newly constructed tourist landscapes. It argues that in China's burgeoning ethnic tourist villages and theme parks can be seen all the contradictions, debasement, and liberating potentials of Chinese modernity. Tim Oakes uses the province of Guizhou to examine the Chinese tourist industry as an example of the state's modernization policies and how local people have engaged with these changes.

Tourism and Modernity in China

Over the past decade, tourism studies has broken out of its traditional institutional affiliation with business and management programs to take its legitimate place as an interdisciplinary social science field of cutting edge scholarship. The field has emerged as central to ongoing debates in social theory concerning such diverse topics as postcolonialism, mobility, and postmodernism, to name just a few. While there has been a diverse body of empirical research on this transformation the theoretical discussions in tourism studies remain largely attached to theories of modernity and Anglo-centric assumptions about tourism. There is a need for the field to come to terms theoretically with the contemporary and future realities of tourism as a truly global phenomenon. Real Tourism is a significant volume which sets this new theoretical agenda, engaging directly with what tourism does in practice and in place and demonstrates the need for a theoretical intervention that moves tourism scholarship beyond the province of Anglophone thinking. The volume achieves this by explicitly bridging âe~westernâe(tm) and âe~non-westernâe(tm) scholarship on tourism; reframing theoretical discussions around âe~real practicesâe(tm) instead of abstract typologies; and radically delinking tourism theory from the grand narratives of modernity and assumptions about authenticity, identity, tradition, and development. The book brings together leading academics in the field and provides provocative multidisciplinary and multi-contextual reflection on the future of tourism. This original, timely and compelling volume puts forward new post modernist ideas and arguments about tourism today and in the future. It is essential reading for students, researchers and academics interested in Tourism.

This innovative volume focuses on tourism through the twin lenses of cultural theory and cultural geography. Presenting a set of innovative case studies on tourist places around the world, the contributors explore the paradoxes of the tourist experience and the implications of these paradoxes for our broader understanding of modern identity as simultaneously grounded and mobile. The book examines how tourism reveals the paradoxical ways that places are both mobile and rooted, real and fake, inhabited by those who are simultaneously insiders and outsiders, and both subjectively experienced and objectively viewed. This rich blend of empirical and theoretical analysis will be invaluable for cultural geographers, anthropologists, and sociologists of tourism.

Remapping Tourism

Travels in Paradox

This innovative volume focuses on tourism through the twin lenses of cultural theory and cultural geography. Presenting a set of innovative case studies on tourist destinations around the world, the contributors explore the paradoxes of the tourist experience and the implications of these paradoxes for our broader understanding of the problems of modernity and identity. The book examines how tourism reveals the paradoxical ways that places are both mobile and rooted, real and fake, inhabited by those who are simultaneously insiders and outsiders, and both subjectively experienced and objectively viewed. The concepts of travel and mobility long have been used to explain modern identity and social behavior, but this work pushes beyond the established literature by considering the ways that place and mobility are inherently related in unexpected, even contradictory ways. Travel, the international cast of authors contends, occurs 'in place' rather than 'between places.' Thus, instead of offering yet another interpretation of the ways modern societies are distinguished by their mobilities-in contrast to the supposed place-bound quality of traditional societies-the chapters here collectively argue for an understanding of modern identity as simultaneously grounded and mobile. This rich blend of empirical and theoretical analysis will be invaluable for cultural geographers, anthropologists, and sociologists of tourism.

Tim Oakes

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