The Affective Negotiation of Slum Tourism

City Walks in Delhi

Tore Holst author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd

Published:14th Aug '20

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

This paperback is available in another edition too:

The Affective Negotiation of Slum Tourism cover

Each year, approximately a million tourists visit slum areas on guided tours as a part of their holiday to Asia, Africa or Latin America. This book analyses the cultural encounters that take place between slum tourists and former street children, who work as tour guides for a local NGO in Delhi, India.

Slum tours are typically framed as both tourist performances, bought as commodities for a price on the market, and as appeals for aid that tourists encounter within an altruistic discourse of charity. This book enriches the tourism debate by interpreting tourist performances as affective economies, identifying tour guides as emotional labourers and raising questions on the long-term impacts of economically unbalanced encounters with representatives of the Global North, including the researcher.

This book studies the ‘feeling rules’ governing a slum tour and how they shape interactions. When do guides permit tourists to exoticise the slum and feel a thrilling sense of disgust towards the effects of abject poverty, and when do they instead guide them towards a sense of solidarity with the slum’s inhabitants? What happens if the tourists rebel and transgress the boundaries delimiting the space of comfortable affective negotiation constituted by the guides? This book will be essential reading for undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers working within the fields of Human Geography, Slum Tourism Research, Subaltern Studies and Development Studies.

"Through this book we come to learn more about the circumstances that together construct the particular spatial environment known as the slum, the representations of Delhi’s street children that become fixed as a part of the guides’ identities and performances, the aestheticization of the slum, and the complex interplays in the co-performances that are the tours. It provides a compelling and insightful lens into the intersections of the complex objectives and impacts of encounters between poverty and tourism."- Meghan Muldoon, Arizona State University

ISBN: 9780367593261

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 453g

184 pages