A booming multinational industry, tourism is a powerful
medium of transnational encounter.  In Hawaii, tourists outnumber
residents five to one.  There is hardly a place on earth not part
of the recreational geography of tourism.   A powerful engine for
moving people from one place to another, tourism produces itself
with ever greater complexity.  An exemplary case of cultural
invention and commodification, tourism is implicated in the
histories of pilgrimage, travel, colonialism, and ethnography,
retracing their itineries and replicating their discourse.  As a
result, tourism offers some of the richest material for exploring
the semiosis of cultural production on a global scale.<br><br>

     Taking a performance studies approach to tourism, broadly
conceived, this course will analyze specific sites and events,
including museums, festivals, historic recreations, and heritage
precincts.  The course is divided into six parts:  the tourism
industry, its history, structure, and discourses; primitivism,
visuality, artifactuality, and the avant-garde; public memory and
the problem of heritage; performed theory in the metamuseum;
African tourisms of diaspora and empire; and abject
tourism.<br><br>

     Drawn from the United States, Australia, Poland, Ghana,
Kenya, New Zealand, and Germany, specific cases include a leper
colony in Hawaii, "Cannibal Tours" in New Guinea, a colonial
homestead and Maasai warrior village in Kenya, "slave tourism" in
Ghana, Ellis Island Restoration and Plimoth Plantation, the
National Museum of the American Indian and the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Schindler's List tour in Cracow, the Los 
Angeles Festival and the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife, 
aboriginality in Australia, and metamuseums in New York, Germany, and Los
Angeles.<br><br>

     Topics include:  tourism as an export industry, heritage
politics (including multiculturalism, public folklore,
international arts festivals) and their relation to notions of
development, sustainability, and public culture, the political
economy of tourism, infrastructure and interface within the
tourism system as engines of meaning, the problem of agency,
performance of ethnographic tropes, theatricalization of the life
world, shifting threshholds of wonder, the equivocal relationship
of actualities and virtualities, "realness" as a mediated effect,
the discourse of "experience," "immersion," and "world," the
nature of "interactivity," and the banalization of memory, among
others.