Since the second part of the nineteenth century the tourist has become an emblematical figure of Western modernity. Due to the democratization of leisure and innovations in transport and mass media, modern man saw his world expand enormously and consequently set out on a previously unimaginable scale to find meaningfulness elsewhere. The global rise of mass tourism has a profound impact on our societies, both tangibly and intangibly. In essence an ‘image production industry’,  the tourist industry affects identity politics of local, national and global cultures and ecosystems, the definition of the self and the Other, the representation of the past, and so on. Tourism and the stories it produces can no longer be seen as something superficial that does not affect ‘real life’: they shape and reshape the ways people see themselves, others, the world and thus deserves thorough academic attention.
 
In this course you will learn how to analyze the visual and textual narratives produced in tourism as well as their effects and reception by making use of a selection of theoretical concepts and approaches from the field of tourism studies: authenticity (the rhetoric of authenticity; ‘staged authenticity’); narrativity (pre- and post-tour narratives; construction and deconstruction of place-myths; branding of cities, landscapes, people); visual culture (‘the tourist gaze’, ‘the host gaze’, ‘film-induced tourism’; tourist photography; social media); phenomena of ‘dark tourism’, ‘post-tourism’, ‘pro-poor tourism’ and so on. All these topics will be illustrated by means of specific case-studies from all over the world. This course will give you insight in how tourism culture can be studied from cultural perspectives, both diachronically and synchronically. You will develop specific skills for observing, analyzing and critiquing it.