Present-Day Mass Tourism: its Imaginaries and Nightmare Scenarios

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SYMPOSIUM: REFLECTIONS BEFORE, DURING, AND BEYOND COVID-19

Present-Day Mass Tourism: its Imaginaries and Nightmare Scenarios Rob Kroes 1

# The Author(s) 2020

Abstract Present-day mass tourism uncannily resembles an auto-immune disease. Yet, self-destructive as it may be, it is also selfregenerating, changing its appearance and purpose. They are two modes that stand in contrast to each other. We can see them as opposites that delimit a conceptual dimension ordering varieties of present-day mass tourism. The first pole calls forth tourism as a force leaving ruin and destruction in its wake or at best a sense of nostalgia for what has been lost, the other sees tourism as a force endlessly resuscitating and re-inventing itself. This paper article highlights both sides of the story. These times of the Covid19 pandemic, with large swathes of public life emptied by social lock-down, remind us of a second, cross-cutting conceptual dimension, ranging from public space brimming with human life to its post-apocalyptic opposite eerily empty and silent. The final part of my argument will touch on imagined evocations of precisely such dystopian landscapes. Keywords Commodification paradox . Time travel . Sites of nostalgia . Lieux de mémoire . Global tourism . Disney-fication . Civil-rights tourism . Environmentalism . Utopian/dystopian imaginaries

This is what present-day tourism has brought us. As Oliver Hardy would have it, in one of the many films starring him and Stan Laurel: Another nice mess you got us into. Photographs amply illustrate this. They show us the congestion, even back-ups, en route to the top of Mount Everest. Or the dense forest of outstretched arms and selfie sticks that prevent us from seeing eye to eye with Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. They show all these cruise ships, ready to sail from Venice, New Orleans and other such ports-of-call, holding out the promise of fulfillment of our innermost private dreams and longings. Among them the classic dream that inspired travel in the days of the “grand tour,” seen as part of the education of aristocrats, of either noble or moneyed background, the elite of the happy few of their time. In today’s mass tourist version, all such dreams have been subverted and turned into their nightmarish opposite. Hordes of tourists now swoop down on places never meant to cope with their numbers. It may remind us of Henry James’s sense of horror when confronted with the mass of immigrants setting foot on Ellis

Island. In The American Scene, written following a return visit to his native country and presenting a view of America seen through the eyes of the quasi-European that James had become, he compared the influx of immigrants to a “visible act of ingurgitation on the part of our body politic and social.” He goes on to ponder “the degree to which it is his American fate to share the sanctity of his American consciousness, the intimacy of his American patriotism, with the inconceivable alien … an apparition, a ghost, … in his supposedly safe old house.”1 This is an apt description of