Rethinking Tourism

Abstract

Emerging from a research trip to New Orleans in March/April 2018, this article explores questions about the politics 'staging' wreckage in relation to conceptualizations and practices of tourism, class and race. Taking as it's central case studies a private vehicular tour of the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans (the area most devastated by flooding as a result of Katrina) and Goat in the Road's immersive, promenade production The Stranger Disease, the work seeks to understand how these two very different cultural objects might be seen to be 'staging' New Orleans in different but inter-related ways that illuminate and critique the politics of (disaster) tourism in the city, and cognate (urban) contexts. Reflecting on the phenomenological experience of the tour and the play in relation to more 'normal' modes of being a tourist in New Orleans, the argument proposes that the embodied experience of performance spectatorship can make radical interventions into process and practice of tourism by rupturing dominant paradigms of power, equity, race and environmental change.

Notes

1 For an account of this activity, see Andrews and Duggan (2018, 2019).

2 The idea of being ‘done with Katrina’ came up in a number of the interviews that Andrews and I conducted in March/April 2018 but was first mentioned by Neil Barclay, then CEO of the Contemporary Art Centre, in conversation with us on 27 March 2018 (the day before we did the tour of the Lower Ninth Ward).

3 See Frank (2019).

4 Robbie’s use of ‘disaster tourism’ emerges from a discussion of ‘grief tourism’, ‘dark tourism’ and ‘thanatourism’ and embeds notions of ‘heritage tourism’ within the final definition.

5 I use scare quotes here because while this is a tour, it isn’t a commercial one. Indeed, our guide later tells us that the ‘Hurricane Katrina Tour’ run by Grey Line (and other commercial tours) is no longer permitted to go into the Lower Ninth and that the only way to see it as a ‘tour’ is with a non-profit organization like hers.

6 ‘Barge board has a special significance in New Orleans. The boards, usually undesirable, over-sized, roughhewn lumber, were reused from flat boats or barges that carried cargo down the Mississippi River to the port of New Orleans.’ (Adamick Architecture 2016)

7 For a chart showing common uses of the urban search and rescue cross after Hurricane Katrina, see Wikimedia Commons contributors (2011).

8 Accounts of people being trapped in their homes, many eventually drowning, are common in academic and journalistic writing about Katrina but perhaps the most evocative account of the terror of this experience can be seen in the documentary film Trouble the Water (2008). Produced by Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, the film includes first-hand footage of the flooding and storm, much shot by Kimberly Rivers Roberts (the central ‘protagonist’ of the film) while trapped in her Ninth Ward attic. At one point in the film an image of the rising waters is overlaid with an audio recording of a genuine emergency services call of a woman seeking rescue from her fast flooding attic. The emergency operator tells her that there is no help available in that moment. The woman replies: ‘So, I’m going to die?’; there is only silence on the other end of the line.

9 In Rebecca Solnit’s and Rebecca Snedeker’s wonderful book Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs presents a short essay entitled ‘Of levees and prisons’ that outlines the connections and parallels between the history of the development of the levee and penal systems across Louisiana and in New Orleans itself.