Description:
This book investigates 'home' and 'homeland' as destinations of touristic journeys and adds to recent scholarly interest in the intersection between tourism and migration. It covers the temporary visits and journeys in search of home and homelands by migrants, displaced people, exiles and diasporic communities in a wide range of different geographical and historical contexts. Personal and collective forms of memory are shown to play a key role in the motivation for, and experience of, such journeys. The volume contributes to the investigation of the tourism-memory nexus as it conceptualizes memory as underpinning touristic mobility, experience and performativity. Based on ethnographic case studies and other types of qualitative empirical research, the chapters of this book foreground individual touristic experiences, emotions, memories, perceptions, the search for identity and a sense of belonging. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of tourism, heritage, anthropology, identity studies, memory studies and migration/diaspora studies.
Brief description:
Sabine Marschall is Associate Professor in Cultural and Heritage Tourism (School of Social Sciences) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban (South Africa). She holds a PhD from the Eberhardt-Karls-University in Tübingen (Germany) and has published widely in the fields of South African art, architecture, cultural heritage (tangible and intangible), heritage tourism, monuments and memorialization. Major publications include Landscape of Memory: Commemorative Monuments, Memorials and Public Statuary in Post-apartheid South Africa (Brill 2010). Her current research interests revolve around the intersection of Memory Studies and Tourism Studies.
Review Quotes:
Curiosity or yearning for 'home' is the theme of this rich collection of essays on the links between tourism, memory, and cultural identity. Germans visiting pre-1945 birthplaces, Israelis touring family sites from pre-Holocaust Europe, Palestinians viewing pre-1948 villages, African-Americans exploring origins in Ghana, all exemplify commonalities in roots tourism. All, however, plus other cases in this deeply moving book, express different senses of homeland and loss.