Cinematic Tourist Mobilities and the Plight of Development

Over recent decades, many commentators on tourism and travel have condemned the managerialist narrownesses by which the twin fields are being almost exclusively taught and researched. In producing this book on 'Cinematics', the cultural sociologist Rodanthi Tzanelli seeks to correct for this large shortfall of schooling and awareness by producing a rich and deep inspection of the political ecology of tourism as she examines the ways in which 'the unchecked neoliberalism' of organised industrial development readily rubs up against 'native knowledges' / 'local aesthetics'. Thus, in this study, tourism is critically inspected by Tzanelli as a professional sphere of privatopias (i.e., as forms of worldmaking monoculture) which readily unsettles alternative communal / interest-group outlooks. She illustrates (via a broad mix of scenarios from across the world) how the governing systems and the inscriptive processes of tourism are so often limited in their imaginative capacity to detect (or even care about?) other vistas of inheritance or other voices of being and becoming.

—Professor Keith Hollinshead, Independent Scholar: England and Australia (Public Culture, Public Heritage, Public Nature)

A fascinating exploration of the complex processes involved in the global expansion of cinematic tourism, which challenges simplistic interpretations through its versatile handling of concepts and its analysis of complex relations, contradictions and dilemmas involving humans and non-humans.

—Professor John Eade, University of Roehampton/University of Toronto

Cinematic Tourist Mobilities and the Plight of Development is an exciting and much-needed addition to the literature on media tourism and the field of (heritage) tourism studies more generally. Twelve years after the publication of The Cinematic Tourist, Tzanelli’s 'sequel' offers another adventurous exploration into the phenomenon of media tourism (or rather, as Tzanelli prefers, contents tourism), this time using case studies of cinematic tourist development to discuss the critical challenges and conflicting interests of contemporary global tourism. Along the way, Tzanelli also reflects on an impressive and original range of (new) theories and (native) approaches to deal with the complex political ecologies of developing filmed locations into touristified spaces.

—Prof. Dr. Stijn Reijnders and Dr. Emiel Martens, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Confronted with over-tourism, increasingly designed environments as well as the spread of local and activist responses to the global mobility systems affording these, Tzanelli provides a staggering assemblage of eastern and western ideas as part of a truly cosmopolitan analysis, critique and call for action. A must-read for all critical students of mobility, tourism and urban/spatial transformations.

—Professor Michael Haldrup, Department of Communication and Arts, Roskilde University