Language, affect, and carnivalesque: tourism encounters and transgressive narratives on a party island

ABSTRACT

Party island tourism is construed as a type of tourism that heavily relies on sensory and intimate encounters that evince structures of inequality. In this paper, I investigate how the notion of the party influences the negotiation of sociolinguistic relations on party islands. By employing a linguistic ethnographic approach, this paper attempts to examine the affective dimensions of the narratives of “tourism frontliners” about their tourism encounters in Boracay from the perspective of the party. The party dynamics in Boracay can be described as carnivalesque, which shows “ … life turned inside out … the reverse side of the world” (Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Translated and edited by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 122). I argue that the coalescence of different participants, emotions, and linguistic practices in the Boracay party enables tourism frontliners to subvert various forms of inequality (e.g. occupational norms, precarity, and discrimination) through their accounts of getting even and getting by. This results in a suspension of reality – a space where transgressive behavior can potentially disrupt or reconfigure unequal sociolinguistic relations. This paper argues that while carnivalesque behaviors are inherently suspensions of reality, their iterability can lead to the establishment of sustainabile transgressive spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Tourism
• carnivalesque
• emotions
• inequality
• transgressiveness

Acknowledgements

I thank Tommaso Milani amd John Richardson for inviting me to be part of this special issue. I also thank Angelika Mietzner and Anne Storch for inviting me to the “Language and Intimacy: Discourses and Narratives” workshop, which significantly inspired this paper. I also thank the following people for their invaluable assistance throughout the writing process: Joseph Park, Crispin Thurlow, Mie Hiramoto, Aileen Salonga, Alwin Aguirre, Andoy Evangelista, Christian Go, and Gene Flores. I am indebted to Ryan How and Wong Wei Li for the Chinese translation and Flora Oh for the Korean translation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This paper uses “affect” and “emotions” interchangeably. This admittedly evades the epistemological debates about the concepts and other related words, such as “feeling” and “sentiments.” I echo Ahmed’s (2014, 4) point on focusing not on what emotion is, but what emotions do; this is because the contrasting terms do not influence the argument of this paper.

2 Many Filipinos colloquially call Boracay “Bora.” This short form does not generally carry any pejorative value. However, during my fieldwork, I was made aware that locals dislike the term “Bora.” I saw signs that state “It's Boracay, not Bora” on the island. According to people I talked to, locals construe “Bora” as the representation of all the detrimental consequences of tourism in the island, such as overpopulation and environmental destruction. This paper uses “Boracay” or “Boracay Island” to reflect this local sentiment.

3 These translations were provided to me by friends who speak Chinese and Korean.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Raymund Vitorio

Raymund Vitorio is an associate professor at the Department of English and Applied Linguistics, De La Salle University, Manila, Philippines. He holds a joint PhD in Language, Discourse and Communication from the National University of Singapore and King's College London. His PhD thesis investigated the discursive construction of citizenship in Singapore – focusing on the citizenship narratives of new citizens. He also does research on tourism discourse and linguistic landscape studies. His research interests include sociolinguistics, linguistic ethnography, discourse analysis, metapragmatics, globalization, tourism, and citizenship.