TOURISM AND PERFORMATIVITY OF LOCAL IDENTITY: NATION AND REGION FROM A POSTCOLONIAL AND GENDER PERSPECTIVE (CATALONIA AND THE BALEARICS: XIX-XXI CENTURIES)
I.P. 1: Mary J. Nash
I.P. 2: Antoni Vives Riera
Name: Call for grants from the State Program for Research, Development and Innovation. Modality of R + D + i Projects Oriented to the Challenges of Society
Agency: Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities
Program: State Program for Research, Development and Innovation oriented to the challenges of the Society
Official code: HAR2017-83005-R
Start date: 01/01/2018
Final date: 31/12/2020
SUMMARY OF THE APPLICATION
The requested research project proposes to investigate from a historical perspective the daily tourist practices as a key element in the contemporary construction of local, regional, national and gender identities. It aims to study the discourses and repertoires of representation linked to certain historical forms of cultural tourism in which the consumption of historical and artistic heritage has been considered by public institutions as an opportunity for national construction. By investigating the most peripheralizing travel practices such as those corresponding to ethnic-folk or naturalistic-landscape tourism, it is proposed to study the role of colonial and postcolonial alterities and regional cultures in the configuration of national identities.
From a methodological point of view, our project proposes the study of the discourses of the texts and repertoires of tourist images with special dedication to the corporal and spatial performativity of the tourist practices. We think that this is a key process in which national, regional and local identities of tourist matrix have materialized in space and in bodily behaviors. In these processes we hope to see how scenarios of hybridization and cultural creativity have been set up in which subaltern strategies of resistance to the identities assigned by the tourist apparatus have been carried out, both by tourists and locals. Our research suggests that both gender representations and performativities are key in these processes as the spaces and bodies involved in modern tourism practice are deeply connoted from the genre.
Finally, the present project is based on the study of multiple historical cases given on the Spanish Mediterranean coast with special emphasis on Catalonia and the Balearic Islands from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. We start from the basis that the study of the Mediterranean brand, which has historically been key in the development of European tourism, offers us the possibility to study at the same time different forms of tourism such as cultural tourism of national affirmation, or ethnic and landscape tourism. of regionalizing character and of colonial matrix. From the comparative analysis of different historical cases we seek to deepen our knowledge of aspects rarely studied in studies on tourism in Spain,
which at the same time are relevant for a greater understanding and sustainable management of tourism today.
KEY WORDS: Tourism, discourse, performativity, cultural diversity, banal nationalism, regional culture, colonialism, gender
