The New Spirit of Hospitality

Tzanelli disturbs the normative premises on which much tourism and hospitality research are predicated to make space for imaginations whereby the represented can manage their representations, and destination design is co-developed with more just digital technologies.

-- Dorina-Maria Buda, Nottingham Trend Business School, UK

Tzanelli goes beyond the co-ordinates of contemporary cultural theory to contextualise a new “atmospheric” ethos in tourism markets. All of this grounded in a Marxist appreciation of the relation of space to labour and, perhaps the most innovative focus of the book, on the notion of worldmaking borrowed from Hollinshead and deployed here to organise the appearances (another mode of spirit, etymologically justified in Marx’s terminology) of tourism in case studies. As cases, however, these studies are saturated in an astute appreciation of theoretical confluence, from Derridean spectres and hospitality to Hardt and Negri’s Empire, to Boltanski and Chiapello, Žižek, Sewell, that guy Hutnyk and the classics – Hegel, Nietzsche, Arendt.

The book narrates a necessary movement from crisis to justice, designing places for care and reviving a new hospitality in an always open-ended inquiry. It will allow you to travel to your own conclusions, taking or leaving the many stops on the way as possible swelling-places or refreshment. Theoretical tourism has rarely been done with such vigour. A fabulous, fun, and flagrantly phantasmagoric read.

-- John Hutnyk, Ton Duc Thang University, Viet