Ecotourism: A Colonial Legacy?

The argument that modern tourism frequently functions as a form of neo-colonial enterprise is by now commonplace. John Frow has explored the ways in which tourism sells a commodified relation to an ontological Other - be it a natural environment, a species of wildlife, or a foreign culture. This relationship, often manifest in ritualised practices such as sight-seeing and souvenir-collecting, is secured via the aestheticisation of various physical and cultural features of a tourist destination and by the commercialisation of immaterial resources such as hospitality. The tourist's position as consumer assumes a priori access to sufficient capital to purchase an encounter with Otherness; hence, it follows that most tourists come from relatively affluent societies while it is the Others of Western modernity who are often called upon to supply the requisite quotient of exotica for the collective tourist gaze. As a relatively new form of leisure activity - at least under its current nomenclature - ecotourism has sought to define itself in opposition to the kind of mass tourism that Frow's analysis implicitly decries. In its purer forms, ecotourism is even premised on behaviours and subject-object relations which are designed to break the relentless cycle of inequality that commoditisation perpetuates. This paper examines the discursive tensions between ecotourism's stated claim to environmental responsibility and its simultaneous imperative to provide predominantly Western clients with an authentic wilderness experience. By reading some of the key visual images and narrative tropes associated with ecotourism alongside their counterparts in colonial discourses such as travel writing, I hope to establish connections that might historicise the current rhetorical purchase of ecotourism as well as provide the basis for an anti-colonial critique of the field

How time flows making games: An ethnographic analysis of experiences of temporality in an indie videogame studio

In research on videogame production, much attention has been given, justifiably, to ‘crunch’, whereby employees in large studios work extremely long hours for months at a time prior to a game’s launch, at the request of management. There has to date been limited research about how duration and urgency are experienced at other periods, and also in the economically and culturally significant ‘independent’ (or indie) sectors and companies. This article draws on a Deleuzian framework initially developed to analyse experience of temporality in academic research, and applies it to data generated by an ethnography of a UK-based indie game studio, which examined how games are produced as part of a more routine working life. The framework enables a re-examination of how ‘passionate’ work in the cultural industries is lived day-to-day, and aims to contribute to debates about the politics of time in the games sector, offering analytic resources which expand the vocabulary for expressing desired experiences of time in game work

Theories of practice and public health:understanding (un)healthy practices

Psychological understandings and individualistic theories of human behaviour and behaviour change have dominated both academic research and interventions at the ‘coalface’ of public health. Meanwhile, efforts to understand persistent inequalities in health point to structural factors, but fail to show exactly how these translate into the daily lives (and hence health) of different sectors of the population. In this paper, we suggest that social theories of practice provide an alternative paradigm to both approaches, informing significantly new ways of conceptualising and responding to some of the most pressing contemporary challenges in public health. We introduce and discuss the relevance of such an approach with reference to tobacco smoking, focusing on the life course of smoking as a practice, rather than on the characteristics of individual smokers or on broad social determinants of health. This move forces us to consider the material and symbolic elements of which smoking is comprised, and to follow the ways in which these elements have changed over time. Some of these developments have to do with the relation between smoking and other practices such as drinking alcohol, relaxing and socialising. We suggest that intervening in the future of smoking depends, in part, on understanding the nature of these alliances, and how sets of practices co-evolve. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of taking social practices as the central focus of public health policy, commenting on the benefits of such a paradigmatic turn, and on the challenges that this presents for established methods, policies and programmes

History\u27s Perilous Pleasures: Experiencing Antiquity in the Postwar Hollywood Epic

This dissertation focuses on the mid-20th Century historico-biblical epic—a film genre that flourished within Hollywood from 1949 to 1966 and which took as its subject the depiction of the ancient world—and reads this body of films as a mode of historical engagement. I argue that the historico-biblical epic takes the pressure of the terrifying possibility of the end of human history engendered by the atomic bomb and transmutes this into a series of dialectics, between agency and powerlessness, embodiment and transcendence, desire and punishment, imperial zenith and nadir. While antiquity seems to offer the modern world the ability to escape from the traumas of World War II, the imminence of a nuclear Armageddon, and the possibility of no future, the epic renders visible and forces an encounter with the very terrors it promises and seeks to escape. As such, it presents a portrait of an uneasy American culture struggling, and never quite succeeding, to make sense of its own position in time and history. Chapter one argues that the proliferation of atomic technologies in the postwar period engendered a profound eschatological fear in American culture, a fear reflected in the historico-biblical epic’s concern with heroic agency and impotence. This chapter draws on a wide variety of historical documents, including contemporary newspapers and magazines, the works of public intellectuals, and thinkers in the Christian press, all of whom struggled to make sense of the possibility of the end of history and whether it could (or should) be prevented through human intervention. I argue that the epic, including films such as The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben-Hur (1959), and Spartacus (1960), takes this terror and sublimates it into an ongoing narrative tension between agency and powerlessness, in which the male hero remains enmeshed in forces that exist beyond his control, his agency constantly displaced onto larger forces such as the will of God or onto a future the films seem reluctant to visually represent. Chapter two argues that the advent of widescreen, inaugurated with The Robe (1953), opened up new possibilities in the way in which the epic framed its temporal and embodied appeals and the way in which it sought to provide an escape from the terrors of modern history. Drawing on midcentury theological explorations of time, industrial and trade discussions of widescreen technology, as well as certain work on time and affect in recent film theory, I explore how the widescreen epic’s emphasis on immersion and embodied presence suggests the ability to escape modernity and experience the fulfillment offered by redemptive Christian time. Simultaneously, the genre’s emphasis on embodiment, both that of its on-screen, Christian convert heroes and the spectator sitting in the audience, draws attention to the limits of temporal transcendence. In chapter three, I shift into a discussion of the use of color in epic films such as Samson and Delilah (1949) and Quo Vadis (1951), arguing that color’s sensory address, combined with the genre’s emphasis on sexual and material excess, expresses a utopian wish to escape from the mesh of modern, linear time and escape into the perpetual present offered by sexual desire. Drawing on recent explorations undertaken in color theory and situating the films in the context of Cold War anxieties over sexuality, containment, and nuclear annihilation, I also show how the sexual excesses and deviance so conspicuously on display intertwine with the moralizing impulse of the films’ narratives, conjoining the pleasures of desire and death. Through this analysis, I demonstrate how these films expose the fractures in the not-yet-hegemonic ideology of containment. Chapter four moves into a discussion of imperial and geopolitical anxieties in later epics such as Cleopatra (1963) and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964). These films provide a conflicted experience of history, one founded on a form of what I call “melancholic utopia,” a hopeful mourning for a brighter future that the films never bring to fruition. In these films, the hero’s aspirations unfold via spectacular displays of armies, vistas, and material wealth, which emerge at key points to create moments in which time is suspended and seemingly filled with vast historical potential. However, these films’ narratives, driven toward failure, suffuse these time-stopping, utopian spectacles with the despair of inevitable historical decline. These films thus provide an experience of history that holds the promise of infinite possibility in productive tension with a deferral of such potential

Black and white and re(a)d all over again: Indigenous minstrelsy in contemporary Canadian and Australian theatre

This essay considers processes by which community identities are challenged by discussing the use of whiteface as an activist strategy in recent indigenous theatre in Canada and Australia. To understand whiteface, I employ Susan Gubar's notion of racechange, processes that test and even transgress racial borders. I also situate whiteface in relation to the history of blackface minstrelsy. Noting the ways these racial performances affirm the hierarchies of color and how power becomes invested in such color codings, the essay highlights indigenous employment of whiteface as a potential form of critical historiography. I then analyze how whiteface functions in two productions, Daniel David Moses's Almighty Voice and His Wife (1991) in Canada and the Queensland Theatre Company's 2000 revival of George Landen Dann's Fountains Beyond in Australia. My analysis posits that such indigenous performances of whiteface can affirm the identity of the marginalized other even as they destabilize the fixity of race and its meanings

“Oh Lord, Save Us from Such Monsters:” Maternal Impression and Monstrous Births in the Eighteenth-Century Netherlands

This historical survey focuses on the memoirs of Catharina Schrader, a Frisian midwife in the eighteenth century, as a lens into beliefs about maternal impression and monstrous births during the early modern period. The then popular theory of maternal impression, where pregnant women could impact their gestating fetus’s appearance or characteristics through their behavior, thoughts, and feelings, was used to explain many instances of monstrous births. Monstrosity, now understood as congenital defects or disabilities, was seen as a result and marker of pregnant women’s moral failings. Using examples of monstrous births from Schrader’s memoirs, I analyze the threat of maternal impression causing monstrosity as a form of control over women’s sexuality, behavior, and desires, focusing on themes of God, sex, motherhood, and paternity. I also link the ideas about maternal impression and monstrous births from Schrader’s world in the eighteenth century Netherlands to modern conceptions of pregnancy and childbirth, exposing the similarities and differences between these ideologies of reproduction

The Ecological Poetics of Deborah Bird Rose: Analysis and Application

In the essay that follows I outline and then respond to the poetic qualities of Deborah Bird Rose’s thinking. Trained as an anthropologist, Rose was a highly original scholar. She pioneered ecological ethnography by focusing on the links between social and ecological justice, in particular with the Yarralin and Lingarra communities in the Northern Territory, and she is a founding figure in the environmental humanities, multispecies studies and extinction studies. Her sustained interest in poetry and the poetic imagination made her ever aware of the power of ‘deep stories’; Rose wanted always to be close to ‘the cadences of the[ir] poetry’ (Wild Dog 16). Unlike many scholars in the humanities, for whom writing and reading are dominated by genres of prose, references to poetry and to contemporary poets are common in Rose’s work, and her writing regularly gestures towards the poetic. Rose’s work is vital for ecological criticism that attempts to grapple with the drastic cultural and climactic changes of this century, particularly for criticism with decolonising ambitions