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- Convenors:
-
Akbar Keshodkar
(Moravian University)
Mailys Chauvin (LAM-CNRS, Sciences Po Bordeaux, France)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Urban Studies (x) Futures (y)
- Location:
- Philosophikum, S57
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 31 May, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
The panel explores how tourism facilitates production and circulation of narratives of urban heritage and memories by non-state actors contesting state-directed representations, contributes to building resilience and notions of belonging, and guides aspirations for urban futures in African societies
Long Abstract:
Tourism has ignited prospects in African cities to contest state-directed narratives and become a space for building new forms of resilience. Situated within the neo-liberal tourism discourse of consuming African places and spaces, the return and engagement of the diaspora in cities of their origin, along with locals, states, or global actors (UNESCO), increasingly challenge the monopoly previously enjoyed by African states in framing representations of urban heritage and history. These developments create new opportunities for constructing alternative urban heritage objects and memory narratives by residents and diaspora (returnees and non-returnees) and formulating new frameworks of belonging to constitute their identities in these cities.
The panel invites papers exploring how competing tourism-directed narratives of urban heritage and memories produced and circulated by these actors contest state-directed representations and guide aspirations for projecting alternative urban futures in African societies.
Some questions papers should consider: how do these actors utilize tourism to appropriate urban objects and elements of culture (ordinary and official buildings, architecture, monuments, know-how, arts, foods, languages) for imagining competing projects to formulate notions of local identities? What are the interactions between locals, the diaspora, and other non-state actors in this process? How do “glocal” collaborations promote alternative forms of tourism consumption and reshape landscapes of tourism sites, products, and interests? How do these alternative forms of urban tourism contribute to residents' economies and lives and serve as a space for new forms of resilience? How do these processes contribute to reshaping urban citizenship and identities in African cities?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 31 May, 2023, -Hee Sook Lee-Niinioja (Independent)
Paper short abstract:
My paper discusses Aapravais Ghat’s cultural landscape related to collective memories to boost dark tourism. A look at the Indian Ocean's tragic past could offer hope for future urban (colonial) tourism, after reviewing the historical site from different perspectives-intercultural interpretations.
Paper long abstract:
The World Heritage criterion (vi) provides a space where tangible objects and intangible assets interact and generate novel meanings: “directly or tangibly associated with events or living traditions, with ideas, or with beliefs, with artistic and literary works of outstanding universal significance.”
Inscribed on World Heritage (2006) with a Criterion (vi), Aapravasi Ghat was the first site chosen for memories of almost half a million indentured labourers moving to Mauritius to work on sugar cane plantations. It represents the development of the modern system of contractual labour, as well as memories, traditions, and values.
Located on the bay of Trou Fanfaron in Port-Louis, the site remains an immigration depot from where the modern indentured labour diaspora emerged. It was built in 1849 to receive labourers from India, Eastern Africa, Madagascar, China and Southeast Asia. This was part of the 'Great Experiment' initiated by the British Government, after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire (1834) to demonstrate the superiority of free labour over slavery in its plantation colonies.
Each landscape has its own history, influenced by both natural and human factors. It receives various interpretations and understandings as mental, perceivable, or visible. Ways of conceiving landscapes lie between physical and cultural geography.
My paper discusses Aapravais Ghat’s cultural landscape related to collective memories of tangible-intangible encounters to boost dark tourism. A look at the Indian Ocean's tragic past could offer new hope for future urban (colonial) tourism, after reviewing the historical site from different inter-disciplinary perspectives and intercultural interpretations.
Mailys Chauvin (LAM-CNRS, Sciences Po Bordeaux, France)
Paper short abstract:
In Stonetown Zanzibar, a UNESCO world heritage and major tourism site, the return of diaspora members while investments on old buildings increase, contributes to produce narratives and claims on the city that helps understanding the sens of urban heritage for citizens and the shaping of citadinité
Paper long abstract:
Zanzibar has become a major urban tourism destination in Eastern Africa especially since Stonetown, its oldest part, was designated as a UNESCO world heritage site in 2000. Recently, the acceleration of foreign investment by the international hotel industry, the multiplication of souvenirs boutiques hold by non zanzibari tanzanians and the transformation of houses into Air B and B flats, lead gradually to important changes like depopulation and sometimes gentrification but also a feeling of dispossession. Meanwhile, Zanzibar diaspora members returned to the city for short or longer stays during the 2010 decade. Since then, returnees together with residents, have been contributing to the production of narratives on the city history, the remaking of places memories and the formation of claims on buildings that were ceaded to investors or neglected by authorities. Some of them appeared to be crucial elements for defining families, individuals, places and areas stories and thinking the future of Stonetown by the community. This turn is an interesting moment in the history of Stonetown to observe and analyse what makes sens today in the making of heritage for citizens, what (re)reshape zanzibaris citadinité, what is the role of places in the belonging process and how people look at the future of their city in a context of neoliberal tourism development. The presentation will examine the links between heritage, tourism, memory of places and citadinité in a context of diaspora return. It will be based on a study of recent buildings claims and Zanzibar diaspora returns in Stonetown.
Heather van Niekerk (University of Johannesburg)
Paper short abstract:
Johannesburg’s inner-city is often portrayed as dangerous, based off stereotypes that reproduce anti-Black imaginations. This paper investigates the racial politics of walking and how tours utilise urban heritage, food, and art to attempt to engage people in spaces beyond class and race divides.
Paper long abstract:
Johannesburg’s inner city is often viewed as a “no-go zone” among suburban inhabitants and international tourists. However, In the last two decades, there has been an increase in inner-city walking tours. These tours generally aim to humanise the city, showing how it can be viewed as a space of excitement and potential rather than one of danger and fear. Tour guides use history and urban heritage, food, and art to draw local and international tourists to engage with the city. Many tour guides see themselves as activists, using their tours to combat historical anti-Black stereotypes through which the inner-city is viewed. The participation of local tourists in inner-city walking tours offers a lens through which one can attempt to understand the efficacy of transgressing racial and class divides still imprinted on the post-apartheid urban landscape. Drawing on longterm fieldwork undertaken with walking tour guides of the city, this paper shows how the practice of walking in racially conscious urban environments can affect and remake space for city inhabitants. The paper therefore investigates the broader question of race, walking and representation in African cities, questioning how international and local imaginations of citiness shape aspirations but also imaginations of what a city should and could be.
Janine Traber (University of Cologne)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the places of subversive narratives about heritage that are deviant from those of big international institutions like UNESCO. In the urban context of Dakar, tourist workers fuel discussions on how to decolonize the ‘Western gaze’ that is currently found in tourism.
Paper long abstract:
Gorée is the most important tourist site in Senegal regarding its role within the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism in West Africa. Due to the remaining architecture, archaeological records and historical documentation, the island was granted UNESCO heritage site status. By these means, it became a significant tourist attraction, especially for the African diaspora on the one hand and French-speaking Europeans on the other. Like at all tourist sites, the visitor’s interactions and emotions are greatly influenced by their formal framing, mainly the feeling of the trauma and the horrors of the slave trade. Nevertheless, the inhabitants of the island and the adjacent capital Dakar have become more and more critical of the supposed foreign idea of ‘heritage sites’ and feel the urge to express their own conceptions about the island, which can contest the established gaze on it. Their interpretations and meaning-making of place, architecture and spirits are much more multifaceted and complex than the above named. They seek to share their perspectives with tourists as well, by alternative guided tours, spontaneous invitations to passing tourists and so on.
This contribution presents a part of my research for my dissertation. I will discuss the layers of meaning-making of space on a heritage site and the decolonial and urban-induced narratives that residents of the island circulate. Local tour guides shall be regarded as cultural brokers in postcolonial encounters with tourists whose expertise not only includes the established presentations of history but also the subversive interpretations of the colonial heritage.
Franck Privat Gonné (ESG-UQAM)
Paper short abstract:
This article aims to reflect in this context of postcolonial transformation on the presence of researchers from French-speaking Africa and especially from Côte d'Ivoire, in the debate on the tourist experience and the attractiveness of memorial sites by resorting to multidisciplinary approaches.
Paper long abstract:
Decolonial and postcolonial transformations and assertions lead to a reinterpretation, a reappropriation of cultural heritage and to socio-political mutations. Tourism and memory are both inseparable elements of the urban environment and must be taken into account. Furthermore, as a tool and object of urban identity, discourse or narrative gives vitality to places, sites, monuments, etc. Thus, the tourist experience and the attractiveness of memorial sites, unlike postcolonial transformation (which has been extensively investigated), remain largely uninvestigated in the academic world in Africa; the French-speaking part of the continent seems to be absent from this debate. The French-speaking part of the continent seems to be absent from this debate. The small number of works from English- and Arabic-speaking Africa is noted in this regard.
This article aims to reflect in this context of postcolonial transformation on the presence of researchers from French-speaking Africa and especially from Côte d'Ivoire, in the debate on the tourist experience and the attractiveness of memorial sites by resorting to other multidisciplinary approaches (urban studies, tourism, memory studies, postcolonial studies). It allows us to understand the relevance of a presence that would contribute to building new knowledge and narratives.
Our proposal is based on 20 scientific contributions in urban and tourism studies, as well as a heuristic approach.
Keywords
decolonial, poscolonial , memorials sites, Côte d’Ivoire, tourism
Akbar Keshodkar (Moravian University)
Paper short abstract:
The paper examines how tourism has created spaces within which neoliberal cosmopolitanism increasingly directs the capacity of non-state actors to appropriate elements of local culture in positing alternative memories and narratives in constituting new frameworks of belonging in Zanzibar society.
Paper long abstract:
Segments of Zanzibar's population assert its identity as a historically multi-cultural, cosmopolitan community. While this proposition remains debated among scholars, the violence of the 1964 Revolution and subsequent continuing rule of the ASP/CCM government for over 59 years over the islands have imposed an "African" footprint for constituting local notions of belonging. Yet, in the development of tourism since the 1980s, now representing a significant portion of Zanzibar's GDP, imagery of Zanzibar as the spice islands, its Arab heritage and rule, and connections to the broader Indian Ocean world rather than with Africa provide prominent motifs in shaping the tourists gaze for imagining Zanzibar's social landscape and representing local notions of belonging. This paper explores how tourism has created spaces within which different non-state actors, including members of the Zanzibari diaspora as well as others seeking new fortunes in the tourism industry from around the world appropriate elements of local culture in pursuit of new pathways of socio-economic mobility in this highly impoverished society and in negotiating alternative frameworks of belonging with local citizens as well as the ruling government. The paper argues that tourism has introduced a new framework of neoliberal cosmopolitanism in Zanzibar, where growing pressures on the internal organization of the weaker ruling government have forced it to accommodate new interactions where its narratives of the past are increasingly replaced with projects for constituting different ideas of belonging for the future, one that is open to anyone who has financial resources to participate in this process.