Tourism in the context of postcolonial and decolonial paradigms

Via
                         Tourism Review
                         16 | 2019
                         Le tourisme à l'épreuve des paradigmes post et
                         décoloniaux

Tourism in the context of postcolonial and
decolonial paradigms
Linda Boukhris and Emmanuelle Peyvel
Translator: Micheline Giroux-Aubin and Nelson Graburn

Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/viatourism/4119
ISSN: 2259-924X

Publisher
Association Via@

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Linda Boukhris and Emmanuelle Peyvel, « Tourism in the context of postcolonial and decolonial
paradigms », Via [Online], 16 | 2019, Online since 30 March 2020, connection on 19 April 2020. URL :
http://journals.openedition.org/viatourism/4119

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Tourism in the context of postcolonial and decolonial paradigms   1

    Tourism in the context of
    postcolonial and decolonial
    paradigms
    Linda Boukhris and Emmanuelle Peyvel
    Translation : Micheline Giroux-Aubin and Nelson Graburn

    Tourism studies and the postcolonial paradigm: A
    French exception
1   Given that France was historically the second largest colonial empire, and that the
    colonies acted as powerful catalysts of globalization of tourism (Baranowski and
    Furlough, 200; Zytnicki and Kazdaghli, 2009), there are remarkably few francophone
    studies on the postcolonial dimensions of the practices, sites, and imaginaries of
    contemporary tourism or on the production of norms governing its economic, social,
    and political organization (Boukhris and Chapuis, 2016). As co-editors of this special
    issue, our approach aims to fill this gap. Our questioning has its roots in our own
    research experiences, marked by movements between several academic environments
    as well as research in various postcolonial contexts: the Americas (Costa Rica, the
    Caribbean) and Europe, as well as the socialist postcoloniality (Pelley, 2002; Bayly, 2007)
    of the former French colony of Vietnam. Our discourse is also situated in France, a
    context that appears as an exception in the production and reception of the
    postcolonial paradigm due to the difficulties in voicing them encountered in both
    academia and education. We found a few early endeavours introducing these
    approaches in geography (Staszak et al., 2003; Chivallon, 2007; Collignon, 2007) that
    nevertheless encountered fierce opposition (Lacoste, 2010). Our situated perspectives
    oblige us to analyze the French reception of the postcolonial paradigm and we invite
    the international readers of this journal, to carry out this same exercise of critical
    analysis of their respective national academic traditions or to re-explore it. This

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    examination serves as a laboratory of the way our contemporary societies engage with
    their slave, colonial and/or imperial pasts.
2   This situation is not limited to geography or tourism studies: rather it results from the
    marginal and controversial place that the postcolonial paradigm occupies in France
    (Bancel, 2012). This “dense and multifaceted intellectual constellation” (Mbembe, 2010) was
    introduced belatedly to the French academic landscape. For instance, Edward Saïd’s
    major contribution, was published in 1978 and translated only two years later 1980, but
    the first seminar on the “postcolonial situation”, was not held until 2006 at the School
    of Advanced Studies in the Social Science (Smouts, 2007) and received harsh criticism
    (Amselle, 2008; Bayart, 2010). Even though elements had been formulated in France
    before the 1980s (Balandier, 1951), they were for a long time confined to the study of a
    limited historical period, that of the independence achieved by former colonies, at
    which time the colonial state apparatus was transformed. However, the term
    “postcolonial” is not simply a historical concept. It rather bears a much broader
    epistemological dimension (Lazarus, 2006) that allows deconstructing the “ideological
    discourses of hegemonic modernity that attempt to legitimize uneven development and
    differentiated and often unbalanced histories of nations, races, communities, and peoples”
    (Bhabha, 1994, p. 171). This is what makes postcolonial studies a paradigm, and that is
    how we approach it in this special issue. Hence, the postcolonial dimension cannot be
    reduced to a historical period, as if it was only the result of a situation requiring
    repentance (Lefeuvre, 2006). Rather, the objective is to understand the overall
    implications of colonization in the touristic organization of colonized societies (past,
    present, and future), and beyond that, understand the structures of the colonial
    thought, what Edward Saïd calls imperialism: the practice, theory, and conduct of a
    metropolitan centre governing a distant territory, long after colonialism. However,
    tourism has been a powerful carrier and transmitter of these structures of thought. In
    that respect, the postcolonial paradigm stems not only from a criticism of how
    contemporary tourist societies function, but also from the expectation of
    compensation, sharing, and reciprocity, for which the tourism economy can contribute
    (Berger, 2006; Mbembe et al., 2006).
3   It is no coincidence that postcolonial studies were first taught in foreign languages and
    literature departments in Great Britain, the United States, and Australia (Ashcroft,
    Griffiths et Tiffin., 1989): examining Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, Edouard Glissant,
    and Franz Fanon in departments of French studies, or Salman Rushdie and Arundhati
    Roy in Indian studies, helped to envisage these literary productions as privileged
    arenas of commitment and struggle. The same could be said for certain tourist spaces.
    Nonetheless, by confining these authors to such a relatively marginal category —
    francophonie1 —contemporary university teaching in France has from the beginning
    missed the postcolonial turn. Furthermore, while postcolonial studies became
    mainstream in the United States, and all the social sciences are becoming postcolonial
    (Smouts, 2007), it seems as though French academic institutions, which are still deeply
    structured by disciplinary approaches and reluctant to cross boundaries, remained
    locked within a debate consisting of opponents vs partisans. Yet, paradoxically,
    proponents of English-speaking postcolonial studies were in fact inspired mainly by a
    theoretical corpus circulating in the United States produced by French authors (Cusset,
    2003), particularly Michel Foucault, whom Edward Saïd explicitly refers to when he
    articulates power and the production of knowledge about an essentialized and

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Tourism in the context of postcolonial and decolonial paradigms   3

    marginalized other, in his seminal work on Orientalism. In this regard, Saïd’s work
    became influential in tourism studies since the 1990s (Hall and Tucker, 2005; Carrigan,
    2011), contributing to more general discussions on the construction of identities and
    alterities, exoticism, folklore, and the touristic experience itself (Edensor, 1998),
    particularly in former colonies, where it was historically been invoked by the United
    Nations and international funders as a lever for development (Craik, 1994; Cousin, 2008;
    Peyvel, 2017). But it was not until the 2000’s that such reflections were tentatively
    promoted in the French language, thus participating in deconstructing narrative
    patterns related to tropical islands as exotic paradises, or authorizing the eroticization
    of female and juvenile bodies viewed as subaltern (Staszak, 2003, 2008; Decoret-Ahiha,
    2004; Belmenouar and Combier, 2007). These works have shown how tourism systems
    built during the colonial period still deeply affect formerly colonized territories today,
    from both material and discursive perspectives (Peyvel, 2011; Vieillard-Baron, 2011;
    Bandyopadhyay, 2012; Buckley, 2013). Negotiations with the past in the service of
    tourism development often appear as sources of conflict, particularly when they relate
    to heritage issues (El Kadi, Ouallet and Couret, 2005; Hall and Tucker, 2005): far from
    being consensual, these fields of action reproduce or reconfigure profoundly unequal
    power relations, not only between the former colonizers and the colonized, but also
    within the local populations, challenging the potentially emancipatory role of tourism.
    The complex temporality in which these touristic products take place is thus
    apprehended from a heuristic perspective using the postcolonial paradigm, which
    invites us to consider in the long term the overall circulation of practices, imaginaries,
    and sites between metropolises and their ancient empires, in the wake of cultural
    studies (Bhabha, 1994; Appadurai, 1996). Indeed, the proponents of subaltern and
    cultural studies have introduced stimulating theoretical and methodological proposals:
    the notion of agency (Guha, 1983; Spivak, 1988), the study of diasporas (Hall, 1990;
    Clifford, 1992; Gilroy, 1993), as well as the concepts of third-space and mimicry
    (Bhabha, 1994). These have considerably enriched the ways of understanding power
    relations from the constitution of colonial empires, particularly in the understanding
    of resistance, recomposition, and arrangement tactics implemented by oppressed
    populations. Subaltern studies also contributed to putting analytical frameworks in
    perspective, such as “provincializing Europe” (Chakrabarty, 2000). This renewed vision
    of the interplay of actors has made it possible to better understand, for example, the
    conflicts inherent in the memory of slavery in France (Chivallon, 2006). Even more
    recently, materialistic approaches centered on practices have been developed, for
    example on prostitution transactions in a touristic context (Roux, 2011), on the
    circulation of ideas associated with bodies (Condevaux, 2011), and sex/gender identities
    (Rebucini, 2013).
4   This belated and contentious reception of the postcolonial paradigm illustrates the
    difficulties in contemporary France of thinking critically about racial difference and
    the present legacies of slavery and colonial history. Indeed, the republican
    universalism that characterizes the “French exception” within Western multicultural
    societies (Simon, 2010) and the legacy of the assimilationist apparatus (Hajjat, 2012) do
    not help us think about the process of racialization and its colonial genealogy (Fassin
    and Fassin, 2006). More recently, the decolonial paradigm also made its entry in French
    academic studies, now having its own research networks, seminars and publications. It
    has also given rise to virulent disputes, as demonstrated by the many widely publicized
    petitions2.

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    The heuristic dimension and paradoxes of the
    decolonial paradigm in tourism studies
5   Without skipping a thorough critical analysis of multifaceted movements characterized
    by multidisciplinary productions of academia and activists, Capucine Boidin
    deconstructs the “three crippling pitfalls” (Boidin, 2009, p. 1) formulated by the
    detractors of the post and decolonial movements, which are US-centrism, Manicheist
    dualism, and essentialism of the research produced. In this regard, the special issue
    Boidin co-edited with Fatima Hurtado Lopez (2009) marks an important step in
    francophone academia in thinking about this “decolonial turn” driven by Latin
    American (Spanish and Portuguese)3 and Caribbean thinkers. The diversity of the South
    American and Caribbean schools of thought attempts to overcome the Eurocentrism of
    postcolonial criticisms4, addressing a multitude of topics beyond the analysis of
    discourses and a multitude of fields beyond British colonial legacies. Decolonial studies
    elaborated from reflections on Spanish and Portuguese Empires and the conquest of
    the Americas articulate economic, historical, sociological, and philosophical analyses.
    Founded on reflections associated with the colonial forms of power (Quijano, 1992),
    knowledge (Lander, 2000), and being (Maldonado-Torres, 2007) that persist after
    decolonization, they seek to deconstruct the colonial matrix forged in the Caribbean
    and American spaces, and a constituent of Western modernity (Mignolo, 2011).
    Decolonial studies notably attempt to demonstrate the complex historical
    interconnections between economic phenomena and racial/class power relations and
    their contemporary reconfigurations: how did violent and oppressive discourses and
    practices articulated with socio-racial and hierarchization processes survive various
    space-times throughout the expansion of capitalism and beyond decolonization? Thus
    the heterogeneity of these studies invites us to go beyond the critique of a threat to
    universalism (Grosfoguel, 2010; Hurtado Lopez, 2017; Bachir Diagne, 2018) and
    demonstrates the need to shift the analysis from the “colonization” to the “colonial
    relations” (L’Estoile, 2008) in order to consider how those relations still persist in the
    present time under various reconfigurations.
6   There is a growing body of work in tourism studies that attempts to mobilize the
    decolonial paradigm and invite us to re-examine analytical categories forged in the
    Western academic field and, particularly in the English-speaking world. Donna
    Chambers and Christine Buzinde (2015) advocate for the heuristic dimension of
    decolonial theories in tourism studies and point out the growing recognition within
    academia of the Eurocentrism of former knowledge related to tourism: “It is also
    increasingly acknowledged within the tourism academy that our existing knowledge about
    tourism is Eurocentric and therefore ignores and negates those knowledges which emanate from
    other cultures and from traditionally marginalised groups (Hollinshead, 1992, 2013; Whittaker,
    1999; Teo and Leong, 2006; Tribe, 2006, 2007; Platenkamp and Botterill, 2013)” (Chambers,
    Buzinde, 2015, p. 2). In an attempt to respond to that same criticism of the
    Eurocentrism of tourism studies, Erik Cohen and Scott A. Cohen (2015) propose to
    integrate tourism within the larger paradigm of mobilities, thereby contributing to the
    positive evolution of epistemological, theoretical, and empirical approaches of the
    knowledge generated. Chambers and Buzinde (2015)—who identify themselves as black
    women working on the topic of tourism—make a major contribution to that criticism of

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    tourism studies’ research agenda considered Eurocentric and colonial: “We do not wish to
    suggest that Western perspectives have no value and should therefore be summarily dismissed,
    but that we have privileged these perspectives and have consequently subordinated and even
    silenced other knowledges from the South, which have equal legitimacy.” (Chambers, Buzinde,
    2015, p. 4). They thus reflexively revisit their own research trajectories so as to
    understand the unconscious, biases, and construction of their framework of analysis
    which are deeply rooted in the dominant Western epistemology. Indeed, they
    acknowledge the situated and historical formation of the dominant epistemology. They
    emphasize the need to mobilize critical theoretical research other than that resulting
    from the postcolonial theory in order to really set in motion the decolonization of
    knowledge. They refer to the concepts of the West Indian psychiatrist Frantz Fanon,
    the Jamaican poet Louise Bennett-Coverley, the Saint-Lucian poet Derek Walcott, or the
    Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. We want to raise the issue of language, central to
    this epistemological decolonization, as highlighted by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. Therefore,
    we particularly mentioned in our call for papers our wish to welcome Creole
    contributions for instance. In that respect, the multi-language project of Via Journal
    seems to us to be a fundamental approach in the emergence of plural forms of naming,
    writing, and thinking about the objects of tourism.
7   We can mention a few articles driven by this decolonial agenda such as the work of two
    Brazilian researchers (Freire-Medeiros and Name, 2017) who aim to rethink the
    historicity of the “mobilities” paradigm (Urry, 2007) introduced as “new”, although it
    was previously addressed by numerous Latin American authors. Hence, they claim the
    importance of deconstructing the Eurocentrism of the production of knowledge that
    naturalizes categories such as cosmopolitism or modernity mobilized to think about
    contemporary mobilities. They specifically insist on the historicity of the circulation of
    persons, capitals, images, ideas, resources, and goods since the 15 th century. Analyzing
    the implementation of the cable car built over the favelas of Rio de Janeiro as part of
    the touristic development strategy, they reconsider the historical discourse about Rio
    de Janeiro as a “tropical” city, such tropicality being directly embedded in
    asymmetrical power relations between Europe and the Americas. The production of the
    modern city according to European aesthetic, cultural, economic and political norms by
    the white elites is linked to the production of the favelas as a racialized landscape. This
    historical contextualization of urban production therefore makes it possible to think
    about the colonial genealogy of the production of the favelas as the landscape of
    Otherness. The authors deconstruct the situated regime of visibility which produces a
    landscape intended to be consumed by the “tourist gaze”. They invite us to reflect on
    the coloniality, still under-emphasized , that takes place in the transformation of the
    favelas into tourist destinations operated by public policies. This approach highlights
    how a research object, the cable car, that could have been apprehended from the
    perspective of urban public policies related to transportation and accessibility, is
    considered as a meaningful technological tool, a vector of aesthetic, visual, ideological
    values at the heart of a historical apparatus of power/knowledge.
8   Other articles propose to adopt a decolonial lens in the analysis of urban renewal
    projects built around the development of cultural and creative industries as well as the
    enhancement of public space. For example, Nizaiá Cassián-Yde (2019) analyzes the role
    of public and private stakeholders who mobilize discourses on the “right to the city”
    and urban democratization in the production of antiseptic, Eurocentric public space, in
    the city of Guadalajara in Mexico. He thus advocates for the decolonization of our

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     urban imaginaries and calls for the consideration of other urban epistemologies which
     reinvent norms and reshape urban spatialities based on subaltern experiences.
9    The decolonial approach is also mobilized to consider the limits of tourism growth and
     particularly the notion of “degrowth” based on other forms of epistemologies such as
     that of “Buen Vivir” that derives from Latin American Indigenous cosmogony
     (Chassagne and Everingham, 2019). Acknowledging the fluid and plural meanings of the
     notion of “Buen vivir” understood as a holistic vision of socio-environmental well-being,
     Natasha Chassagne and Phoebe Everingham (2019) analyze tourism development
     initiatives carried out in an Ecuadorian community, envisioned as an alternative to
     extractivist economies. The authors don not mobilize the paradigm of sustainability or
     models of poverty reduction as analytical frameworks to think about community-based
     tourism, but rather focus on discourses, norms, and practices articulated to the “Buen
     Vivir” philosophy embracing both humans and non-humans. However, the article does
     not lend sufficient attention to Indigenous voices while one of the main issues at stake
     is about elaborating a participatory and integrated approach of tourism development
     based on traditional knowledge. A similar approach based on the mobilization of
     Indigenous cosmogonies of “well-being” can be found in the analysis of ecotourism in
     Brokpa communities of Bhutan (Karst, 2017). The article emphasizes the necessity of
     promoting a plurality of non-occidental voices and questioning analytical categories
     from the Western epistemology. Accordingly, the author suggests consideration other
     forms of relations with Nature based on non-naturalist ontologies (Descola, 2005) in
     order to think about ecotouristic practices in protected areas. Undoubtedly, the author
     could have gone further in re-examining the dominant epistemology of conservation
     represented by the very idea of protected areas. This draws attention to the difficulties
     in going beyond a thinking of the “alternative” within an analytical framework that
     remains dominant.
10   Indeed, the publication coedited by anthropologists Alexis Bunten 5 and Nelson Graburn
     (2018), Indigenous Tourism Movements, focusing on tourism projects among different
     Indigenous communities in Australia, the Americas and Africa, and the role of tourism
     in the reconfiguration of power relations, raises the question of situated knowledge
     and attests to the difficulties of mobilizing subaltern voices within academia. The co-
     editors explain their primary concern in involving Indigenous voices in their research
     project, not just as respondents but by inviting researchers from Indigenous
     communities as producers of academic knowledge, allowing to partly go beyond the
     dissymmetry of the anthropologist-respondent relationship and avoid duplicating
     some sort of epistemic violence. However, they also point to their failure to mobilize
     these voices, recognizing that Indigenous colleagues might be involved in social and
     political struggles otherwise more urgent that editing a volume of academic research.
     This leads us to focus on the impasse of a paradigm that aims to mobilize other
     epistemologies to reflect on the world but that can also be stuck in the contradictions
     of academic works situated within the dominant epistemology and from the academic
     institution. In the meantime, intermediary actions can be taken, as suggested by Freya
     Higgins-Desbiolles and Kyle Powys Whyte in their deconstruction of the “critical turning
     point” of tourism studies: “How many of the self-declared critical tourism scholars come from
     communities of colour and for those that come from communities of privilege how often do they
     seek collaborative opportunities with those that come from other backgrounds? Without these
     bonds of solidarity, we find ourselves in danger of talking for others or even talking only amongst

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     those like ourselves at a complete disconnect from the people at the ‘coalface’ of tourism’s
     negative impacts” (Higgins-Desbiolles, Powys Whyte, 2013, p. 432).
11   With that in mind, we wish to reconsider the essay proposed by Sarani Pitor Pakan
     from the Wageningen University in Holland, “Can the ‘Other’ Frame Back in Tourism
     Studies? Experimenting to Respond in an Asymmetrical Dialogue” in a format that goes
     beyond the normative frame of a scientific. This essay offers an Indonesian researcher’s
     situated trajectory in the field of tourism studies. “As a researcher from the South, I am
     tempted to write with a certain degree of rage […] against the ignorance that has silenced the
     voices from (the) South all this time”: this is the author’s project - to reconsider, in a
     reflexive process, his attempt to overturn the asymmetrical power relations between
     the representations of the “East” and the “West” based on an analysis of the
     photographic practices of Indonesian tourists to the Netherlands. Recognizing the
     contradictions of a project that would imply symmetric power relations between
     Orientalism and Occidentalism, Sarani Pitor Pakan (2020, in this volume) delivers a
     narrative marked by the problematic of the deconstruction of the coloniality of
     knowledge.
12   While not exhaustive, these few examples of recent works in tourism studies illustrate
     different research objects apprehended from a decolonial perspective, revisiting
     historical and contemporary arrangements of knowledge-power in multiple touristic
     situations, mobilizing or calling on the conception of other epistemologies to reflect on
     the spatial practices and imaginaries, while also emphasizing the insoluble
     contradictions of such a project.

     Rethinking dialectically the centre and periphery: for a
     critical approach to tourism within former colonial and
     imperial metropolises
13   One of the first axes of our call for contributions proposed to decentre the perspective
     of postcolonial approaches based on formerly colonized countries and/or those under
     imperial domination (Hancock, 2009), and to encourage critical analyses of tourism
     stakeholders, places, practices, and imaginaries within the “North(s)”. Indeed, the
     history interwoven between colonies and the European metropolis made a lasting mark
     on these two spaces, long considered as radically distant and different, even though
     they have co-constructed themselves (Cooper and Stoler, 1997). Both colonial and
     imperial cultures (Blanchard and Lemaire, 2004) had long lasting impacts on European
     metropolises in a dialectic relation that postcolonial and/or decolonial paradigms
     strongly encourage us to explore. Urban space, architecture, heritage, culture (from
     museum collections to the performing arts), all of which are objects of tourism studies,
     endured power relationships inscribed in a colonial genealogy and are continually
     reconfigured in the present time. There are of course francophone researches that do
     not directly refer to these paradigms questioning colonial tourism systems within
     former colonial metropolises, like those concerning zoos (Estebanez, 2010). Other
     works have dealt with related issues: recent debates surrounding the burkini on French
     beaches, problematic vacations of descendants of immigrants in Algeria (Bidet and
     Devienne, 2017), or the controversial creation of the Hôtel du Nord, a cooperative of

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     residents working in tourism in Marseille’s northern districts (Hascoet and Lefort,
     2015).
14   The European scene indeed offers a particularly interesting context of mobilization
     from minority social groups (claiming their “Afropeanity”, Afro-feminism, or
     Indigeneity) in media, cultural, heritage, and touristic projects. The case of France is
     characteristic of the powerful upswing of counter-hegemonic narratives since the early
     2000s, emphasizing the multiculturalism of French society and the power relations at
     stake. A number of these projects are based on a heritage, cultural, and touristic
     approach, for example the tourism project of “Paris noir” (black Paris) (Boukhris, 2017).
15   In this issue, we would have liked to welcome critical analyses from these actors,
     places, imaginaries, and tourism practices at the margin of the conventional tourism
     developments, but unfortunately, we have not received any such contribution. We
     believe that this is a wider indication of the difficulty for tourism studies to grasp the
     postcolonial or decolonial perspective in the North(s). To that effect, it is not just about
     the modalities of the touristification of material and immaterial traces of the colonial
     past. As Ann Laura Stoler (2016) rightly says, the difficulty precisely resides in the way
     we, social scientists, apprehend what falls under the category “postcolonial”, as if there
     were research objects properly labelled “postcolonial” (exoticism, orientalism,
     museums’ colonial collections, built heritage from the slavery and colonial periods,
     etc.), and other objects not covered by this framework. She invites us to reconsider
     today’s imperial continuities and to identify the existing colonial dynamics shaping
     nowadays multiple spaces, practices, and imaginaries, from borders to security issues,
     from the environment to the economy, as many objects questioned by tourism studies.
16   It is from that same angle that Michael O’Regan’s (2020, in this volume) analysis of the
     secretive economy of the casinos in Macau can be understood as a reconfiguration of
     the colonial order. Tourism is then conceived as a hegemonic project that establishes a
     regime of truth and visibility. It is also the approach proposed by Habib Saidi (2020, in
     this volume) when he examines the work relationships in the Tunisian hospitality
     sector. He analyzes the “domination technologies” of subaltern bodies implemented in
     hotels in the context of a “bio-hospitality” based on an ethnography conducted in these
     hotels along Tunisian coast.

     For a materialistic approach to the making of alterities
     and identities in the touristic context
17   The objective of the second axis of our call for papers was to participate in making
     more complex the bilateral frame for thought that, if it constitutes a fundamentally
     asymmetric dimension of imperialism, should not be locked in infernal dyads, thus
     essentializing the strict relationship colonizer/colonized. In this regard, this second
     axis encouraged a materialistic approach to de-compartmentalizing the creation of
     alterities and identities in a tourism context, through the analysis of the effects of
     categorization, prioritization, and domination and the (re)production of inequalities
     and power relations based on race, class, and gender that tourism may trigger.
18   In this approach, the concept of “agency” appeared as a promising notion to tackle
     such complex colonial relations as: interest, opportunism, adhesion, but also how
     avoidance and resistance at the face of imperialist powers depend on political actions,

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Tourism in the context of postcolonial and decolonial paradigms   9

     whose arenas today are also touristic. That is why this second topic was meant to be
     inclusive of all forms of tactics and accommodations employed in tourism—including
     within minority populations in the “North(s)”—faced with daily forms of
     marginalization and oppression, whether social and/or racial discriminations, homo/
     lesbo/transphobia, (dis)ableism, or sexism.
19   Even though this part of the call was not fully answered, we received proposals related
     to the circulation and re-appropriation of colonial grids of thought in the construction
     of social, racial, and gender hierarchies, reflected in museums dedicated to categories
     of population (museums of ethnology, women’s museums…), and more generally in
     Nations’ landmarks, where domestic tourism traffic may officially be supported in
     order to strengthen national identity and simultaneously legitimize the organization of
     a country’s diversity (Cabasset, 2000; Peyvel, 2016; Michalon, 2020). In that axis, we
     encouraged research that focused on tourism economies—in the context of domestic
     tourism—exploiting alterities founded on ethnic and gender categorizations, in order
     to better delineate the underlying mechanisms of domination: marginalization of
     certain populations designated as “others” in the touristification of a country;
     alteration and legitimized monopolization of tourism resources by a small number;
     population groups designated as “others” turned into spectacles by the local elite…
     Sarah Coulouma’s text (2020, in this volume) on the touristification of the Wa people in
     China, as a form of domestic primitivism in the Chinese province of Yunnan, falls under
     that framework.
20   Furthermore, because colonization often resulted in the forced movement of
     populations on an unprecedented scale, it led to the production of multiple identities
     for the affected populations whose territorial anchors as well as social, racial, and
     gender situations can be complex. Tourism participates very concretely in the
     production of alterities and identities, from the family to the transnational level,
     notably through “diasporic” or “roots” tourism. Anthony Goreau-Ponceaud’s
     contribution (2020, in this volume), discussing tourism policies of the Indian state,
     participates to this reflection on fluid identities, through hybridizations and ethnic
     mixtures, to better grasp the role of tourism in the material and discursive
     effectiveness of transnational networks in the production of contemporary identities
     and alterities.
21   Finally, the interview conducted with the anthropologist Nelson Graburn (2020, in this
     volume) is an invitation for us researchers to develop a critical reflection of the
     production of our situated knowledge. Recalling close to sixty years of research in arts,
     culture, and tourism, in areas ranging from Canada to Japan or China, he shares the
     various socio-historical and academic contexts that led to his empirical, theoretical,
     methodological, and epistemological choices. He sheds light on the growing emergence
     of postcolonial and decolonial paradigms. As an anthropologist following a path of
     plural international mobilities, Nelson Graburn offers us a very interesting insight on
     the various reflections conducted in several academic spaces (Brazil, China, Japan, etc.)
     and the resistance against what he calls the “Anglophone snake”, resulting in subaltern
     anthropologies of tourism.

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NOTES
1. French-speaking countries.
2. “Le ‘décolonialisme’, une stratégie hégémonique : l’appel de 80 intellectuels”, Le Point, November 2018
(« Decolonialism, an hegemonic strategy: the call of 80 intellectuals »; “La pensée ‘décoloniale’
renforce le narcissisme des petites différences”, Le Monde, September 2019 (« Decolonial thinking
reinforces the narcissism of small differences »).
3. These intellectuals are all members of the group Modernity/Coloniality, created in 1998.
Among them are: the sociologist Aníbal Quijano, the semiologist Walter D. Mignolo, the
anthropologist Arturo Escobar, the sociologist Edgardo Lander, the anthropologist Fernando
Coronil, the philosopher Nelson Maldonado Torres, the sociologist Ramón Grosfoguel, and the
philosopher Enrique Dussel (non-exhaustive list).
4. Obviously, numerous theoreticians of the postcolonial thought originate from the South (G.
Spivak, H. Bhabha, E. Said, to name just a few), but their epistemologies remain deeply set in the
Western world, mobilizing concepts that derive from poststructuralism and postmodernism.
5. Bunten Is a Native-Alaskan whose own research examined of the situated expectations of
American tourists and Native guides and the resultant discourse in Sitka, Alaska. To reach
beyond the limited academic world she published her dissertation as a trade book So, how long
have you been Native? Life as an Alaska Native tour guide. (2015)

AUTHORS
LINDA BOUKHRIS
MCF, Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, IREST, linda.boukhris@univ-paris1.fr

EMMANUELLE PEYVEL
MCF, Université Bretagne occidentale, emmanuelle.peyvel@univ-brest.fr

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