Cinematic Tourist Mobilities and the Plight of Development: On Atmospheres, Affects, and Environments

by Rodanthi Tzanelli

Overview

It is said that movies have encroached upon social realities creating tourism enclaves based on distortions of history and heritage, or simulations that disregard both. What localities and nation-states value are discarded, suppressed, or modified beyond recognition in neoliberal markets; thus flattening out human experience, destroying natural habitats in the name of development, and putting the future of whole ecosystems at risk.

Without disregarding such developmental risks Cinematic Tourist Mobilities and the Plight of Development explores how, en route to any beneficial or eco-destructive development, film tourist industries co-produce atmospheres of place and culture with tourists/film fans, local activists, and nation-states. Drawing on international examples of cinematically-induced tourism and tourismophobic activism, Tzanelli demonstrates how the allegedly unilateral industry-driven ‘design’ of location stands at a crossroads between political structures, systems of capitalist development, and resurgent localised agency.

With an interdisciplinary methodological and epistemological portfolio connected to the new mobilities paradigm, this volume will appeal to scholars, students, and practitioners interested in tourism, migration, and urban studies in sociology, anthropology, geography, and international relations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780367556167
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	06/30/2020
Series:	Routledge Advances in Sociology
Pages:	234
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Rodanthi Tzanelli is Associate Professor of Cultural Sociology at the University of Leeds, UK.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1_Introduction

Chapter 2_On touring the world: an epistemontological frame

Phantasmagoric palimpsests: twenty-first-century cinematic tourist atmospheres

Cities and countrysides: toward a new cinematic tourist mobilities paradigm

Western/European practice on the bar? Heritage and the holistic plea for life

Chapter 3_Attuning and aligning: synaesthesia and the making of worlds

An ecoaesthetics of worldmaking in cinematic pilgrimage

A primer in epistemontological investigation

Chapter 4_Mobile design: a purposeful pilgrimage into cinematic tourist sites

Carving mobilities: a preliminary statement

Poly-graphic design: a selection of case studies

The island of order(-ing): freedoms and burdens in Orientalisation

 

Chapter 5_The ‘hubris of the zero point’: three responses

Towards a choreutics of ecosocial action

Epistemic misalignment

Hospitality

Postindustrial disobedience

Islands of disorder and choreosophies of potentia

Chapter 6_Crafting the impossible, meddling with the anthropocenic puzzle

Classroom experiments, lessons learned

Windows of darkness: degrowing and enfolding

Windows of hope: from heritage to identity reinterpretation

Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

Over recent decades, many commentators on tourism and travel have condemned the managerialist narrownesses by which the twin fields are being almost exclusively taught and researched. In producing this book on 'Cinematics', the cultural sociologist Rodanthi Tzanelli seeks to correct for this large shortfall of schooling and awareness by producing a rich and deep inspection of the political ecology of tourism as she examines the ways in which 'the unchecked neoliberalism' of organised industrial development readily rubs up against 'native knowledges' / 'local aesthetics'. Thus, in this study, tourism is critically inspected by Tzanelli as a professional sphere of privatopias (i.e., as forms of worldmaking monoculture) which readily unsettles alternative communal / interest-group outlooks. She illustrates (via a broad mix of scenarios from across the world) how the governing systems and the inscriptive processes of tourism are so often limited in their imaginative capacity to detect (or even care about?) other vistas of inheritance or other voices of being and becoming.

—Professor Keith Hollinshead, Independent Scholar: England and Australia (Public Culture, Public Heritage, Public Nature)

A fascinating exploration of the complex processes involved in the global expansion of cinematic tourism, which challenges simplistic interpretations through its versatile handling of concepts and its analysis of complex relations, contradictions and dilemmas involving humans and non-humans.

—Professor John Eade, University of Roehampton/University of Toronto

Cinematic Tourist Mobilities and the Plight of Development is an exciting and much-needed addition to the literature on media tourism and the field of (heritage) tourism studies more generally. Twelve years after the publication of The Cinematic Tourist, Tzanelli’s 'sequel' offers another adventurous exploration into the phenomenon of media tourism (or rather, as Tzanelli prefers, contents tourism), this time using case studies of cinematic tourist development to discuss the critical challenges and conflicting interests of contemporary global tourism. Along the way, Tzanelli also reflects on an impressive and original range of (new) theories and (native) approaches to deal with the complex political ecologies of developing filmed locations into touristified spaces.

—Prof. Dr. Stijn Reijnders and Dr. Emiel Martens, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Confronted with over-tourism, increasingly designed environments as well as the spread of local and activist responses to the global mobility systems affording these, Tzanelli provides a staggering assemblage of eastern and western ideas as part of a truly cosmopolitan analysis, critique and call for action. A must-read for all critical students of mobility, tourism and urban/spatial transformations.

—Professor Michael Haldrup, Department of Communication and Arts, Roskilde University

From the Publisher