Exploring Travel and Tourism

Book excerpt: Exploring Travel and Tourism: Essays on Journeys and Destinations offers a broad treatment of topics in global travel/tourism studies through articles first presented at Travel and Tourism panels at Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association conferences between 2007 and 2010. Through archival research, close readings and case studies, the authors assembled here examine the significance of travel and the tourist experience over the last two hundred years, from Borneo to Cuba to Niagara Falls, and places in between. The contributions seek to unpack the meanings of nationality, postcolonialism, place, gender, class and the Self/Other dyad as they bump up against the framework of travel studies. Taken together, the articles speak to central issues in current scholarly debates about travel, tourism and culture from various historical, geographical and disciplinary perspectives. The contributions are grouped thematically into three sections. Part I, “The Personal Travel Narrative: Constructing the Self Through Encounters with the Other,” offers close readings of travelogues, both published and unpublished. Part II, “Constructing a National Identity Through Tourism,” details the ways that nations and states market themselves to tourists. Part III, “The Meaning of Journey; The Meaning of Destination,” investigates places, both real and created, and the ways people travel to get to them.