Rationalizing Tourism: Neoliberalism, Neocolonialism, and Self-Care Culture

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

Late-stage American Empire is expansive, mobile, and undergirded by neoliberal logics of individual investment and entrepreneurship. The tourism industry exemplifies these characteristics, facilitating neocolonial projects, economic and cultural exploitation, and glorifying consumerism. At the same time, some travelers assert that mobility can facilitate transnational dialogues, reparative justice, and individual transformation. This panel explores tourism during late-stage American Empire by emphasizing how different entities — travelers, media, governments, and corporations — rationalize tourism, depicting it as necessary and helpful. These rationalizations often conceal the harmful global effects of tourism.

The four panelists address different aspects of American tourism, threaded together by tourism’s neoliberal fictions and the notion that travel can be “helpful” or productive. Mora McLean examines the destructive impact of cruise ship tourism in St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where exploitation of the harbor is rationalized as economically beneficial despite its many negative effects. Linking the solo women’s travel trend to self-help culture, Leah Butterfield analyzes how popular narratives frame solo travel as a productive means to self-improvement. Ellie Kaplan also explores the concept of travel as transformative by addressing travel to U.S. National Parks in the context of the disability rights movement. Lastly, Joseph Donica examines American tourism to sites of tragedy in Cambodia, considering dark tourism’s emphasis on authenticity and how memorials are understood to be geopolitically helpful in preventing a repetition of history's wrongs. Overall, this grouping of papers indicates the emphasis on productivity and “helpfulness” in late-stage American tourism, highlighting the tension between neoliberal logics, colonial legacies, and the flicker of liberatory possibilities for individual travelers.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Battered Paradise: The Progressive Destruction of St. Thomas Harbor, St. Thomas, USVI - Mora McLean, George Washington University

• Neoliberal Tourism: Solo Women’s Travel as Spiritual Self-Investment - Leah Butterfield, University of The Bahamas

• Disability, National Parks, and Empire from the Nineteenth Century to the Present - Ellie Kaplan, University of California Davis

• Tourists, Pilgrims, and Mourners: Americans at Cambodian Sites of Collective Memory - Joseph L. V. Donica, City University of New York

Chair

• Rosalie Uyola

Biographical Information

Panelist 1 Bio:
Mora McLean is interested in American cultural understandings of “progress” and “development,” and how black activists, intellectuals, and educators transnationally engaged in the politics of knowledge relative to Africa and its diaspora in the Americas from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Building on years of work experience in the international nonprofit sector, in 2021 she began a transition toward scholarship and teaching by earning an MA in History from Rutgers University. At George Washington University her doctoral dissertation research in American Studies explores the buried and contested founding history and cultural milieu of the Africa-America Institute (AAI), a mid-twentieth century non-profit, non-state actor in US international affairs, and site of political struggle over the purpose and meaning of US engagement with Africa. She grew up in the US Virgin Islands, the ancestral home of her paternal grandparents who were black African descendants born in the islands under Danish rule.

Panelist 2 Bio:
Leah Butterfield is an Assistant Professor of English at The University of The Bahamas. Her research focuses on women’s travel, migration, and social movements within and beyond the US, especially as presented in memoir and personal narrative. She has published in Feminismo/s, The Routledge Handbook of Latinx Life Writing, and elsewhere. Her book manuscript, Women Astray: Mobility, Confinement, and Self-Fulfillment in 21st-century U.S. Memoir, shows how divergent groups of women—including tourists, migrants, and activists—contest gendered experiences of confinement through various journeys of self-determination. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies, with a Portfolio in Women’s and Gender Studies, from the University of Texas at Austin.

Panelist 3 Bio:
Ellie Kaplan is a PhD Candidate in the History Department at the University of California Davis. She previously earned her M.A. in history from Syracuse University. Her dissertation explores how the National Park Service (NPS) implemented Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act from the 1970s to the present. Of particular interest are the ways disabled visitors and employees influenced the process and made the law meaningful to their lives. Recently Ellie completed an internship with the National Park Service where she conducted oral histories and wrote several articles for the NPS website. Additionally, she is interested in the integration of disability stories and themes into K-12 curriculums. She has worked for the Library of Congress as a Junior Fellow and the California History-Social Science Project as a Graduate Student Researcher on this endeavor. Ellie is currently the Director of Graduate Student Affairs for the Disability History Association.

Panelist 4 Bio:
Joseph Donica is a professor of English at City University of New York's Bronx Community College. As a professor of American literature and a scholar of memory studies, he writes about literature and collective memory and how we use that memory to move us through collective crises. Donica has recently co-edited a collection, Queer Then and Now (Feminist Press, 2023). He is finishing a scholarly monograph Inequality's Memory: American Literature after the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street and completing a fantasy series titled The Secret History of Unicorns in the Bronx.