My paper will focus on how tourism workers from mainly Senegal, use multimodal souvenir T-Shirts to participate in the discourse about their lives and especially their work in the Spanish tourism sector.
Paper long abstract
201.38 km beeline separates El Arenal on the coast of Mallorca and Barcelona. Mass tourism interconnects them and brings millions of visitors to both places every year. As a souvenir and multimodal material object of tourism, the ubiquitous T-Shirt projects stereotypes and narratives about destinations and is often hostile, constructing the host as the Other at the travel destination (Storch & Mietzner 2021). Yet the T-Shirt can also be used to display political resistance and as a means of perseverance and survival in the often-precarious labor at the beach and shopping districts.
My paper will focus on how African tourism workers, especially from Senegal, use T-Shirts to participate in the discourse about their life and particularly their labor in the Spanish tourism sector.
Whether by wearing T-Shirts with prints of famous discos in the El Arenal party district to engage in conversation with potential buyers of souvenirs or by producing and selling T-Shirts with subversive language and political statements in Barcelona about migration to and in Europe. I will discuss some examples of multimodal T-Shirt prints from data I collected at the two destinations. Here I will focus not only on the text and language displayed but also on the signs embedded in the fabric.