Preliminary communication
The perennial Western tourism representations of India that refuse to die
Ranjan Bandyopadhyay
; Department of Hospitality, Recreation & Tourism Management, San Jose State University, San Jose, USA
Abstract
Western media represents Third World destinations and communities as stagnant and primitive. Scholars have argued that these representations are fundamentally related to the practices of colonization. Except for a few valuable exceptions research on tourism representations of the Third World is scarce. In tourism research, previous investigations have been mainly limited to analyses of visual images and texts of tourist brochures, newspaper articles, postcards and travel magazines. However, researchers have paid little attention to conduct a historical study of Western tourism representations of the Third World taking a larger sample of data. Thus, this study explored if there is any difference between the way India and Indians are represented in the nineteenth century Western travel writing, and contemporary Western travel writing. The results revealed that much like in the nineteenth century, contemporary Western travel writing also emphasizes the romantic image of India and Indians – timeless, poverty-stricken, exotic women and effeminate men. Therefore, it can be argued that colonialism is still pervasive in contemporary Western tourism representations.
Keywords
representations; romanticism; discourse; colonialism; tourism; India
Hrčak ID:
52936
URI
Publication date:
15.4.2009.
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