The Media and the Tourist Imagination: Converging Cultures

Summary

Tourism studies and media studies both address key issues about how we perceive the world. They raise acute questions about how we relate local knowledge and immediate experience to wider global processes, and they both play a major role in creating our map of national and international cultures.

Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, this book explores the interactions between tourism and media practices within a contemporary culture in which the consumption of images has become increasingly significant. A number of common themes and concerns arise, and the contributions included are divided between those:

• written from media studies awareness perspective, concerned with the way the media imagines travel and tourism
• written from the point of view of the study of tourism, considering how tourism practices are affected or altered by the media
• that attempt a direct comparison between the practices of tourism and the media.

Incorporating case study material from the UK, the Caribbean, Australia, the US, France and Switzerland, this significant text - ideal for students of culture, media and tourism studies - discusses tourism and the media as separate processes through which identity is constructed in relation to space and place.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction 2. Mediating Tourism: Analysing the Caribbean Holiday Experience in the UK National Press 3. Media Makes Mardi Gras Tourism Mecca 4. Inter/Intra-Textual Ruralities and the Televisual Tourist 5. Amber Films and Documentary: The Validity of Visual Representation 6. 'On the Actual Street' 7. Tourism, Popular Music and the Media 8. 'Troubles Tourism': The Terrorism Theme Park on and off Screen 9. Screening Stirling 10. 'I was here': Pixilated Evidence 11. 'I'm Only Here For The Beer': Post-Tourism and the Recycling of French Heritage Films 12. 'We're Not Here to Make a Film about Italy, We're Here to Make a Film about ME...': Changing Conventions in British Television Holiday Programmes 13. Tourism and Television: Some Similarities 14. Culture Industry; Culture Clash; Identity Crisis 15. Journeying in The Third World: From Third Cinema to Tourist Cinema 16. Discovering America?: Experiencing the USA in the UK

Editor(s) Bio

David Crouch is Professor of Cultural Geography, Tourism and Leisure, and Rhona Jackson and Felix Thompson are Lecturers in Film and Television Studies at The University of Derby.

Reviews

'A ground-breaking collection that that brings forth new ideas for the critical analysis of the interface between tourism and media studies.'

- Dr Kevin Hannam, University of Sunderland

'This thought-provoking volume diversely maps the overlapping contours of the real and imaginary domains of tourism and media, and the complex landscapes we navigate on journeys through screens, sounds and scenery.'
- Mark Neumann, University of South Florida