NEW MONOGRAPH: Magical Realist Sociologies of Belonging and Becoming The Explorer

Magical Realist Sociologies of Belonging and Becoming

The Explorer

At the bottom of the sea, freedivers find that the world bestows humans with the magic of bodily and mental freedom, binding them in small communities of play, affect and respect for nature. On land, rational human interests dissolve this magic into prescriptive formulas of belonging to a profession, a nation and an acceptable modernity. The magical exploration is morphed by such multiple interventions successively from a pilgrimage, to a cinematic and digital articulation of an anarchic project, to an exercise in national citizenship and finally, a projection of post-imperial cosmopolitan belonging.

This is the story of an embodied, relational and affective journey: the making of the explorer of worlds. At its heart stands a clash between individual and collective desires to belong, aspirations to create and the pragmatics of becoming recognised by others. The primary empirical context in which this is played is the contemporary margins of European modernity: the post-troika Greece. With the project of a freediving artist, who stages an Underwater Gallery outside the iconic island of Amorgos, as a sociological spyglass, it examines the networks of mobility that both individuals and nations have to enter to achieve international recognition, often at the expense of personal freedom and alternative pathways to modernity.

Inspired by fusions of cultural pragmatics, phenomenology, phanerology, the morphogenetic approach, feminist posthumanism and especially postcolonial theories of magical realism, this study examines interconnected variations of identity and subjectivity in contexts of contemporary mobility (digital and embodied travel/tourism). As a study of cultural emergism, the book will be of interest to students and scholars in critical theory, cultural, postcolonial and decolonial studies, and tourism/pilgrimage theory.

Reviews

"The book is an imaginative contribution to the sociology of aesthetics and offers interesting perspectives on mobility and belonging."

— Gerard Delanty, Professor of Sociology, Social and Political Thought, Sussex European Institute & School of Law, Politics and Sociology.

"Rodanthi’s multi-layered monograph offers intricate social-scientific analyses of the key human processes of becoming and belonging. Through four rhizomatic ‘readings’ that draw on various instantiations of the magical-realist type of ‘the explorer’, the author shares her critical insights about the current condition of Greece in particular and post-colonialisation and neo-liberalisation in general. That this thought-provoking text is hard to summarize or categorize is perhaps all the more reason to read it."

— Noel B. Salazar, Sociocultural Anthropologist, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.

"This remarkable and incredibly wide-ranging book is on one level a study of a tourist event, the ‘one breath’ Underwater Gallery off the Greek island Amorgos, but it is also about so much more. Through uncovering the many modalities and layers of the tourist site, Tzanelli encompasses, one might say, a breathtakingly original and challenging interrogation of cultural theory, modernist aesthetics, tourist studies, sociology, visual theory, feminism, and postcolonial theory. Through a magical realist, contrasted with rationalist, lens her book is also informed by an emancipatory imperative to elucidate alternative visions of modernity through exploration of existential, experiential and corporeal travel. It is a landmark work of empirical sociological study and critical social theory."

— Larry Ray, Professor of Sociology, University of Kent.

"Social thinking is a creative endeavor. Unfortunately, there is often quite far between real manifestations of critical-creative social thinking. Rodanthi Tzanelli’s book on Magical Realist Sociologies of Belonging and Becoming comes to a well-awaited rescue for those stranded on the shores of routinized thinking. Rarely do we find such creativity in the field as in this book. The exploration reaches deep into the waters of interdisciplinary reflection, and travels across the vast territories of art, philosophy, and social theory making an important lighthouse for contemporary social thinking. We needed a magical realist map of this world, and Dr. Tzanelli just provided us with one."

— Ole B. Jensen, Professor of Urban Theory, Department of Architecture, Design & Media Technology, Aalborg University.

"This is the first book to boldly and magically transform traditional notions of worldmaking, being and becoming, critically challenging industrial capitalism and rationalized modernity to create radical conceptualizations of ethnic, gendered and non-human difference. Guided by Greek magic realism and postcolonial modes of ‘realist magic’, Dr. Tzanelli undertakes a philosophical and cultural journey into the multidimensional phenomenon of popular culture, transcending disciplinary silos, decentering the sociological imagination from Western-centered perspectives, and interleaving magically with tourism to construct new ontological and epistemological understandings and analyses of cultural pragmatics. Interview quotes and a personalized narrative weave artistry into phenomenal and material exploration of digital and cinematic technologies, "govermobility", emotion, embodiment and performativities of belonging."

— Tazim Jamal, Professor, Department of Recreation, Park and Tourism Sciences, University of Texas.

"In this work of iconoclastic erudition, which drives a critical wedge into the authority of rationalist social-science epistemologies, Rodanthi Tzanelli probes the persistence of hierarchies of art, scholarship, and cultural identity in the neoliberal age. By performing this exercise in a particular country, Greece, and by sympathetically connecting that country’s cultural specificities to its ongoing geopolitical vicissitudes, she reveals the dynamics and constraints of local artistic production as symptomatic of global realities – and especially of the capacity of powerful interests to disenchant the world by denying or fixing the significance of embodied experience."

— Michael Herzfeld, Ernest E. Monrad Research Professor of the Social Sciences, Harvard University.

"Tzanelli’s unique book takes us on a journey of embodied artistic subjectivity as it navigates modernity’s multiplicity, and especially the price that must be paid for protecting what one loves in the (post)colonial, hypermobile Capitalocene. Those with a deep knowledge of sociological theory will particularly appreciate Tzanelli’s layered and complex treatment of the issues she considers, while more general tourism studies readers will enjoy tracing the book’s central character and his freediving community’s artistic engagement through tourism’s governmental-industrial worldmaking machine."

— Kellee Caton, Professor of Tourism, Thompson Rivers University.

Worldmaking and the Economy of Desire in Rio 2016

SP MOBILITIES SAO PAOLO, 13-15 March 2019

Worldmaking and the Economy of Desire in Rio 2016

You can watch this presentation on You Tube

Cities partake in selection competitions for the Olympic Games in their desire to be included in an international community of nations upholding a set of ‘universal values’. They promise to promote these values through the impeccable organization of the mega-event, in an ordered, safe and hospitable manner. Such ‘scripts’ can be followed with some degree of precision, but the precision itself comes at a cost.

This is what the Citade Maravilosa, a city of phantasmagoric postcolonial mobilities, discovered during one of the most challenging projects it undertook in its modern history. The Rio 2016 ‘project’ proved a double-edged sword, cutting the city both at the end of discipline and punishment and that of self-fulfilment through art-making and tourist worldmaking. With every change introduced to its fabric to produce a universally acceptable profile, new sociocultural problems emerged or old ones were exacerbated, withering its ‘marvelousness’ for the sake of conforming to the demands of hospitality. Today, intellectual, academic and political critics of this persistence to host the Olympics continue to perform post-mortem examinations on Rio de Janeiro’s wounded cultural and social spheres, whereas its citizens continue to clean the bloodbath of violence caused by the mega-event’s ‘pacifications’.

In this presentation I outline the ways in which we can approach the economic, political and cultural cost of securing a ‘passport’ to the mega-event’s amplified global mobilities of tourism, professional migration and technology. I provide you with two scenarios. First, I argue that for Rio the cost was double: not only did the passport posit serious challenges and obstacles to the city’s field of justice, it also invited the ‘scientisation’ of its carioca uniqueness, thus reducing it into a spectacle to be enjoyed ‘from afar’. The two costs are interdependent and point to Rio’s (in)ability to protect its freedom in late capitalism. The second scenario is contentious for its optimism. I claim that there are also voices of hope articulated within these stringent structures of international, national and regional regulation, which point to alternative vistas of a brighter future. To explore conflicting forces within this desire to make better worlds for cariocas and their guests, I dig a bit deeper into the cultural poetics of Rio 2016. This poetics supersedes politics and can be potentially liberating.

Reconsidering tourismophobia in cinematic tourism mobilities

SSP Research Culture Seminar Series

13 March 2019

Dr Rodanthi Tzanelli

Abstract

SEMINAR SLIDES UPLOADED: 

ON SLIDESHARE

The presentation focuses on the ways localities, nation-states and national or international activists (as the former’s spokespersons) respond to excessive cinematic touristification in reactionary or defensive ways. The cases upon which I draw are mostly episodic, but crucial for the current global climate of hostility against forms of strengerhood. Because established analytical frames on social movements do not assist in the study of most such episodic expressions of discontent, a new analytical model is devised to tease out their affective significance in the grand scheme of globalisation.

ISA Call for Papers on the theme of ‘Critical Thinking in Tourism Studies’ for Tourism, Culture and Communication



 

 

 

 

We are pleased to announce a NEW Call for Papers on the theme of ‘Critical Thinking in Tourism Studies’ for Tourism, Culture and Communication, managed by Guest Editors Rodanthi Tzanelli, University of Leeds, UK and Maximiliano Korstanje, University of Palermo, Argentina. This Special Issue is a COLLABORATIVE PUBLICATION between TCC and ISA (The International Sociological Association) via the latter's Research Committee (RC50) on 'International Tourism'  Commissioning Editors are Keith Hollinshead (TCC) and Rukeya Suleman (RC50 / ISA).

The importance of criticality in the development of different analytical traditions in tourism studies is indisputable. Whether they focus on Marxist-inspired critiques of industrial production, in which tourism is a ‘consciousness industry’ (Enzensberger 1974), on Wallerstein’s ‘systems theory’ in which an exploitative European ‘world centre’ caters for tourist demand to consume peripheral exoticism (Greenwood 1977; Britton 1989), on  occulocentric practices organised by ‘experts’ and consumed by clients (Urry 1999, 2002; Hollinshead 2009), or on the deployment of tourism as a performative tool for collective self-aggrandizement by states and communities (MacCannell 1973; Edensor 2002), such arguments seek to promote particular modes of critical thinking.

As early as the 1940s, Frankfurt School-inspired critical theory equipped tourist studies scholarship with appropriate tools to examine tourism as an economic process, a multi-industry and a social fact (von Wiese 1930; Bornmann 1931). Indeed tourism’s contribution to an essential division of human activities between work and leisure in Western and European societies (Krippendorf 1986) --- which coincided with the institution of paid holidays as a universal right (1940) --- fed into such arguments, so the critical turn became entangled in globalised/Europeanised institutional changes, inducing new objections to treating tourism as a universal value. From the late 1990s-2000s, a ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (with its ‘critical mobilities’ branch (Söderström et al. 2013)) breathed new life into these debates by employing new methodological and epistemological tools from Complex Adaptive Systems and Actor-Network Theory, in which ‘systems’ comprise more or other-than-human actants that propel different types of human performance in tourism (Sheller and Urry 2004; Hannam et al. 2006).

Regardless of their differences, all these arguments and schools share an interest in the promotion of critical thinking. This Special Issue seeks to bring to academic discourse what ‘critical thinking’ truly is as an epistemic mode favouring systems, or a form of structural and/or agential meaning-making performed by host communities, tourists, tourist design industries and scholars in tourist studies and other cognate fields.

Topics:

Some indicative but not exhaustive themes for possible papers are:

• The importance of systems theory today (e.g. considerations of tourism as a multi-system; tourism and complexity theory)
• New forms and styles of criticality in tourism analysis
• Implementations of critical thinking in contemporary socio-cultural contexts of tourism (e.g. disaster zones, military tourism, dark and slum tourism or Brexit)
• Critical tourism studies and modes of host, guest or industrial agency
• New critiques of traditional critical theory in the field (e.g. problematic prioritizations of the economic or the political over the cultural or aesthetic as a critical mode)
• Critical thinking and (re)definitions of ‘tourism’ and the ‘tourist’

 

Submissions: Abstracts of 300 words which contribute to knowledge about the role of critical thinking in tourism contexts should be submitted by email to both r.tzanelli@leeds.ac.uk and mkorst@palermo.edu by no later than 15 February 2019. Please email us your abstracts under the title ‘RC50/ISA CfP Abstract Submission’.

The abstracts will enter a peer review process, from which only successful applicants will be invited to submit full manuscripts. The deadline for submission of first drafts of manuscripts is 15 March 2019. Deadline for receipt of first drafts of manuscripts is 1 July 2019. Accepted papers will normally be limited to 7000 words, max.

 

 

 

 

 

NEW MONOGRAPH: Cinematic Tourist Mobilities and the Plight of Development: On Atmospheres, Affects, and Environments

Cinematic Tourist Mobilities and the Plight of Development: On Atmospheres, Affects, and Environments

By Rodanthi Tzanelli

Routledge  URL: https://www.routledge.com/Cinematic-Tourist-Mobilities-and-the-Plight-of-Development-On-Atmospheres/Tzanelli/p/book/9781138388673 

Description

It is said that movies have encroached upon social realities creating tourism enclaves based on distortions of history and heritage, or simulations that disregard both. What localities and nation-states value are discarded, suppressed, or modified beyond recognition in neoliberal markets; thus flattening out human experience, destroying natural habitats in the name of development, and putting the future of whole ecosystems at risk.

Without disregarding such developmental risks Cinematic Tourist Mobilities and the Plight of Development explores how, en route to any beneficial or eco-destructive development, film tourist industries co-produce atmospheres of place and culture with tourists/film fans, local activists, and nation-states. Drawing on international examples of cinematically-induced tourism and tourismophobic activism, Tzanelli demonstrates how the allegedly unilateral industry-driven ‘design’ of location stands at a crossroads between political structures, systems of capitalist development, and resurgent localised agency.

With an interdisciplinary methodological and epistemological portfolio connected to the new mobilities paradigm, this volume will appeal to scholars, students, and practitioners interested in tourism, migration, and urban studies in sociology, anthropology, geography, and international relations.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1_Introduction

Chapter 2_On touring the world: an epistemontological frame

Phantasmagoric palimpsests: twenty-first-century cinematic tourist atmospheres

Cities and countrysides: toward a new cinematic tourist mobilities paradigm

Western/European practice on the bar? Heritage and the holistic plea for life

Chapter 3_Attuning and aligning: synaesthesia and the making of worlds

An ecoaesthetics of worldmaking in cinematic pilgrimage

A primer in epistemontological investigation

Chapter 4_Mobile design: a purposeful pilgrimage into cinematic tourist sites

Carving mobilities: a preliminary statement

Poly-graphic design: a selection of case studies

The island of order(-ing): freedoms and burdens in Orientalisation

Chapter 5_The ‘hubris of the zero point’: three responses

Towards a choreutics of ecosocial action

Epistemic misalignment

Hostipitality

Postindustrial disobedience

Islands of disorder and choreosophies of potentia

Chapter 6_Crafting the impossible, meddling with the anthropocenic puzzle

Classroom experiments, lessons learned

Windows of darkness: degrowing and enfolding

Windows of hope: from heritage to identity reinterpretation

Bibliography

Reviews

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