Description
Since Cynthia Enloe’s powerful analysis of the global politics of tourism in her book Bananas, Beaches and Bases (1989), tourism has slowly gained scholarly attention as a crucial international phenomenon. Tourism is a powerful global system and an immense form of cross-border mobility. It governs a complex array of people and places, categorising, ordering and (de)prioritising them in complex ways. Tourism is also shaped by and (re)shapes diverse forms of power and relations globally, in the context of modern colonial capitalism. This panel takes the opportunity to look back at the scholarship on and developments in tourism since 1989. It examines how tourism currently enacts power in the world, and (re)shapes (among other things) spaces, (in)securities, economies, identities, policies, and relations at various scales. It asks the following questions: (1) How does tourism shape our day-to-day lives? (2) How has tourism transformed our world? (3) How has tourism become a globally powerful phenomenon? This roundtable addresses these questions and identifies also the opportunities to challenge the underlying global (im)mobility regime which (re)produces different privileged/marginalised modes and figures of human spatial mobility – such as ‘tourism/migration’ and ‘the tourist/the migrant’ – in the hope of a world with greater social and ‘mobility justice’.
