This article takes the “island” as a key trope in tourism studies, exploring how ideas of culture... more This article takes the “island” as a key trope in tourism studies, exploring how ideas of culture and nature, as well as those of paradise (lost) are central to its interpretation for tourists and tourist industries alike. Increasingly, however, island tourism is blurring the line between geographies of land and water, continent and archipelago, and private and public property. The case of ‘The World’ islands mega project off the coast of Dubai (UAE) is used to chart the changing face and future of island tourism, exploring how spectacle, branding and discourses of the gigantic, miniature, and fake, alongside technological mediations on a largescale, reflect the postmodern neoliberal world of tourism and the liquid times in which we live. Artificial island complexes such as this one function as cosmopolitan ‘non-places’ at the same time that they reflect a resurgence in (British) nascent nationalism and colonial nostalgia, all the whilst operating in a sea of ‘junkspace’. The shifti...
Afterword : Less than easy tourism research in a world of fun
Response to Marzia Milazzo's review of Conspicuous Consumption in Africa
Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2021
We are writing as contributors to, and editors of, the volume Conspicuous Consumption in Africa (... more We are writing as contributors to, and editors of, the volume Conspicuous Consumption in Africa (WUP, 2019), to express our deep concern at a review of this book which was published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, 44/8, 2021, pp. 1445–1447. Milazzo’s overall line of argument in her review is that our book provides “a twenty first century version of this white supremacist argument: Black people should not own anything because they will squander whatever they have” (1447). The book, she alleges, “silences white dominance and white ‘material excess’; and ‘pathologizes Black people as being simply unfit for freedom’” (1447). These are serious allegations, and one assumes that they would not be made lightly. Coming in the form of an academic review, in a leading academic journal, one imagines they would be grounded in careful analysis and argument, engaging substantively with the text of the volume and demonstrating a careful and full reading thereof. We are struck, however, by the apparen...
This article takes John Berger's seminal book on art criticism, Ways of Seeing (1972), as a s... more This article takes John Berger's seminal book on art criticism, Ways of Seeing (1972), as a starting point for looking at the South Asian monsoons from the perspective of wetness. Revisiting Gupta's 2012 work ‘Monsoon Fever’ to think through its watery elements as more closely tied to the visual, sensorial, and affective, it focuses on three distinct representations of the monsoons: photographer Ritesh Uttamchandani's 2014 ‘Facing the Monsoon’ series set in Mumbai, which showcases a range of personalised attitudes towards contending with monsoonal rains as an urban infrastructure; journalist Cynthia Barnett's journey to write the story of the fine art practice of crafting attars in Kannauj, India, wherein the fragrant earthy wetness of the monsoon (considered ‘rain perfume’) is captured in a bottle, and includes synthetic versions; and lastly, a lone photograph by Arko Datto that suggests the sublime monsoon as affect in all its subdued wet colours but also portends climate change for South Asia. Together, these watery readings suggest a renewed attention to ways of seeing the monsoon differently, via the visual, sensorial, and affective.
Friction and Fragments: Local Cosmopolitanism in Postcolonial Mozambique
Traversing Transnationalism, 2011
Chapter 1: Introduction: the relic state
The relic state
Gandhi and the Goa Question
Public Culture, 2011
Gandhi's Hind Swaraj is analyzed as a statement of transnational politics and circulation, it... more Gandhi's Hind Swaraj is analyzed as a statement of transnational politics and circulation, its ideas enabled by the Indian Ocean and applicable to Goa's independence from Portuguese colonial rule.
Uploads
Papers by Pamila Gupta