• Issue number 129 (Fall 2017)
  • Issue editors: Daniel Bender (University of Toronto), Steven Fabian (State University of New York at Fredonia), Jason Ruiz (University of Notre Dame), Daniel Walkowitz (New York University)

This issue of the Radical History Review will explore radical approaches to the study of tourism.  As Hal Rothman has argued, tourism economies frequently represent a “devil’s bargain” between tourists and those that he and others have called the “toured upon.”  We want to extend Rothman’s understanding of tourism to ask questions that speak to broader forms of human mobility, from those who tour as a leisure activity to the tourism as a colonial project. How do people and communities resist the exploitative aspects of the touristic encounter? How do the practices of tourism challenge or reinforce the “realness” of nation-states, ethnic groups, and other imagined communities?

Tourism represents a critical way of producing knowledge about the ‘Other,’ poverty, nature, and culture, and it is the task of radical historians to interrogate the underlying systems of power that shape that knowledge production.  Tourism engages contested spaces and histories of those spaces, variously engaged by tourists, both local and foreign, and local residents, but also by curators and museum professionals, guides, and private and public agencies for which the project is a business as well as local, regional and national politicians.  This issue seeks essays that engage these struggles and the diverse cultural, political, and economic sources contestants mobilize.  It also interrogates the relationship between the knowledge produced by tourism in everyday life and of dominion such as empire.

This issue is interested in both the history of tourism and history in tourism.  What kinds of narratives about modernity, folklore, and development are produced through the tourist encounters? How does tourism, as a global industry with its own capitalist and labor history, relate to other forms of ethnographic leisure, such as museums?  How do local actors decide which historical narratives are privileged in the marketing of a place? How do tourists’ demands for authenticity, accessible infrastructure (including railroads, hotels, police, etc.), and adventure shape local and regional political economy?  What modes of agency do the “locals” express—or lack—as they approach the touristic encounter?

We will bring together scholars from a variety of disciplinary and geographic locations to provide alternative histories of the touristic encounter.  We are especially interested in essays that transcend national boundaries, asking big questions about tourism from a transnational perspective.  Topics might include (but are not limited to):

  • The origins of modern tourism
  • Tourism and empire
  • Ecotourism and touring nature
  • Culinary tourism
  • Guidebooks
  • Medical and plastic surgery tourism
  • The work/labor of tourism
  • Heritage tourism
  • Living history
  • Slumming
  • Sex tourism
  • Anti-tourism activism and other modes of resistance
  • Tourism and Nationalism
  • Space tourism

The RHR seeks scholarly, monographic research articles, but we also encourage such non-traditional contributions as photo essays, film and book review essays, interviews, brief interventions, “conversations” between scholars and/or activists, and teaching notes and annotated course syllabi for our Teaching Radical History section.

Procedures for submission of articles: By January 15, 2016, please submit a 1-2 page abstract summarizing the article you wish as an attachment to contactrhr[at]gmail.com with “Issue 129 Abstract Submission” in the subject line. By March 1, 2016, authors will be notified whether they should submit a full version of their article for peer review. The due date for full-length article submissions will be July 1, 2016.

Please send any images as low-resolution digital files embedded in a Word or PDF document along with the text. If chosen for publication, you will need to supply high-resolution image files (JPG or TIFF files at a minimum of 300 dpi) and secure permission to reprint the images.

Those articles selected for publication after the peer review process will be included in issue 129 of the Radical History Review, scheduled to appear in October, 2017.