Paper short abstract:

This paper presents Bois Chéri Tea Plantation in Mauritius as a site of labour and leisure. Through the lens of plantation labour I analyze how colonial histo works to simultaneously obscure and reproduce social inequality amongst those responsible for creating the tourist gaze.

Paper long abstract:

John Urry (2002) described the tourist gaze as a way of seeing which separates tourist experience from the reality of everyday experience but these collide when labour and leisure meet in the same place. In Assam tourists pay large sums of money traveling to remote towns to learn how to pick tea leaves in locally or nationally owned ‘gardens’ alongside local women. Agro-tourism is defined as “the economic multidimensional development of agricultural farms and multidimensional development of rural areas” (Zoto et al., 2013: 210) and agricultural production is the main source of income. After independence Bois Chéri Tea Plantation gained a new life - an afterlife - as a ‘historical’ site of tourism and labour and, as a modern space of luxury and opulence. Using qualitative research methods and an immersive ethnographic approach over 9-months in Bois Chéri Tea Plantation I studied the tea plantation tourism through the lives and living conditions of labourers wondering what recursive elements of colonial imagination and history are found in places where we go to, to “escape”, to relax, to live in tranquil, serene and enclosed environments’ (Trouillo, 1995)? This led me to ask, what does tea plantation tourism obscure, silence and reflect and what effect does that have on lives of those responsible for creating the ‘tourist gaze’? It’s important to know how the history of slavery and colonialism continues to simultaneously reproduce and obscure social and economic disparity through modern policies and practices in the agro-tourism industry.