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TOURIST PRODUCTIONS
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H42.1041
Spring 1998
Tuesday 4-7
http://www.nyu.edu/classes/bkg
Tisch School of the Arts
Department of Performance Studies
721 Broadway, 6th floor, New York, NY 10003
998-1620 (for office hours), 998-1628 (for messages)
FAX: 212-254-7885 / krshnbtt@acf2.nyu.edu
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
A booming multinational industry, tourism is a powerful medium
of transnational encounter. 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. This course will undertake a
performance analysis of tourist productions, including tourist
discourse, settings, events, experiences, and artifacts.
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. We will pay special attention to the
political economy of tourism as seen through a close analysis of
actual sites.
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. We will theorize
infrastructure and interface within the tourism system as engines
of meaning. We will consider 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.
Specific cases include: "Cannibal Tours" in New Guinea, a
colonial homestead and Maasai warrior village in Kenya, Colonial
Williamsburg, Ellis Island Restoration and Plimoth Plantation, the
Museum of the American Indian and the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A
Living Memorial to the Holocaust, the African Burial Ground, the
Los Angeles Festival and the Smithsonian Festival of American
Folklife, the Salon de Fleurus, and theme parks, among others.
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READINGS
Texts for the course can be found
at the NYU Book Center, the Performance Studies Archive (hours are
posted), and Bobst Reserve Desk.
There are several resource bibliographies for the course, with periodic
updates. Because this material is so extensive, it has been placed
on reserve in the PS Archive and can be accessed from our homepage.
You may xerox these bibliographies, download these lists as
electronic files, or run your own searches.
* * *
ELECTRONIC ACCESS
All students are urged to sign up for an email account in
order to take advantage of online bibliographies for their research
projects and to access sites on the World Wide Web:
Check the course newsgroup:nyu.tsoa.ps.tourist
Bobst (ask at any Bobst reference desk) about RLIN, DIALOG,
Internet, and WWW training sessions
ACF (Academic Computing Facility, 998-3333) workshops are
highly recommended.
Pro-Cite and Endnote are recommended software packages for
managing bibliographic information and formatting citations on
both Mac and PC systems.
* * *
ASSIGNMENTS
1. Research Project (20 pages--DUE Thursday April 23)
The major assignment for the course is a research paper
(preceded by a proposal and followed by an oral report). The paper
is to be a case study of a particular tourist production (event or
site), based on original research (field work, observation,
interviews, documentation, archival research, and other kinds of
primary sources). This project should combine rich empirical
research with conceptualization and analysis informed by the
readings, lectures, and discussion.
Research papers are posted on our course home page under
READINGS . Go to the bottom of the page for links to full texts of
articles and papers written for the course.
Collaborative projects are encouraged. Many tourist
productions are large and complex, best studied by a team.
Collaborations should be structured so that each party produces an
identifiable component of the final project, but does so as part of
a team.
Project Proposal (3 pages--DUE February 24)
State the research problem clearly and identify the specific
case. Explain your choices. Identify the relevant theoretical
literature for your project and indicate what you have already
read. Be sure to identify previous studies that might serve as a
model for your project and identify specifically those aspects that
will inspire your work. State what you hope to contribute.
Specifically address how your work will build upon or contribute to
Performance Studies.
Explain how you will go about your research, what you have
done so far, difficulties you anticipate, help you need. What is
your plan of work? Check the PS Archive for books dealing with
fieldwork and interviewing.
Include a tentative outline for the paper.
You are encouraged to schedule a time to meet with me to
discuss your paper topic. For research ideas, check out tourist
guidebooks to New York City, the many brochures at the New York
Visitor's and Convention Bureau and Loeb's Student Center at NYU,
as well at NYC newspapers, magazines, and listings of events for
the spring.
Oral Conference Presentation (2 pages): DUE Sunday April 26, 8:30
am - 6:00 pm)
Each person will make a 5 minute (2 pages) oral presentation
based on her/his project at a formal conference held all day on
Sunday April 26. The report will be handed in, as well as
delivered orally. Detailed instructions will be provided closer to
the time.
III. Portfolio
Keep a portfolio of all the work you do this semester--reading
notes, field notes (for required and recommended activities), short
written assignments for class, the project proposal, paper, and
oral report. Hand in the complete portfolio, except for oral
presentation, on Thursday April 23. Include a brief statement in
which you assess your own work for the semester and guide the
reader through the portfolio.