A 5* Destination: the Creation of New Transnational Moral Spaces of Remembrance on TripAdvisor

Abstract

In this article, we demonstrate how the digital sphere and individual contributions within it add to a process of worldmaking by creating a new transnational moral order that reinforces notions of a transnational humanity and shared values. Specifically, tourists' interactions in the digital sphere create a new moral space-in our analysis on the internet platform TripAdvisor.com-where they comment on their particular experience when visiting memorial sites of atrocities such as mass violence or genocide. This article contributes to approaches that see dark tourism not in terms of voyeurism or amorality but instead as a constituent part of moral meaning-making in individuals' experiences of post-genocide spaces, expanding these arguments from the material visits of the tourists to their discussions in the digital sphere. This is affected by-yet at the same time contributes to and thus perpetuates-the transnationalisation of memory by which the way we remember and commemorate is increasingly becoming similar on a global scale. This transnationalisation is both forwarded by and constitutive of the digital sphere in which we study it. Empirically, this article draws on visitor reviews that were posted on the travel website TripAdvisor regarding the dark tourism sites Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and Kigali Genocide Memorial in Kigali, Rwanda, expanding our understanding of responses to these memorial sites into the digital sphere.

Remembering and silencing complexity in post-genocide memorialisation: Cambodia’s Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

“…As such, the museum's curation was clearly targeted at both domestic and international audiences. Today, international tourists dominate among the visitors to TSGM, 4 as the memorial museum is seen as a 'must-see' destination (Buckley-Zistel and Williams, 2020;Isaac and Çakmak, 2016), but in recent years TSGM has prioritised making the site more accessible for Cambodians as a memorial and education space. 5 The exhibition draws strongly on shocking aesthetics that do less to inform and more to provoke emotion (Hughes, 2008;Isaac and Çakmak, 2016;Violi, 2012), providing an 'impressionistic, immediate access to the exhibits, based mainly on sensations and impressions rather than on cognitive content' (Violi, 2012: 48).…”

“…As such, the museum’s curation was clearly targeted at both domestic and international audiences. Today, international tourists dominate among the visitors to TSGM, 4 as the memorial museum is seen as a ‘must-see’ destination (Buckley-Zistel and Williams, 2020; Isaac and Çakmak, 2016), but in recent years TSGM has prioritised making the site more accessible for Cambodians as a memorial and education space. 5…”

“…In the end, the space clearly shows the terrible violence wreaked upon the country by the Khmer Rouge. Various elements, from torture equipment and uncremated bones to purportedly authentic spaces, coalesce to create a space that is shocking and horrific to visitors (Buckley-Zistel and Williams, 2020; Isaac and Çakmak, 2016). A generalised sense of cruelty inflicted on victims, evidence and authenticity attributes responsibility for the violence and perpetration abstractly.…”

“…12 Currently, though, a homogenous victimhood is suggested and without personalising information one receives no opportunity to determine anything about the victims. This leads to a general construction by some visitors of all victims being innocent (Buckley-Zistel and Williams, 2020), demonstrated in one quote of S-21 being ‘a place of captivity and torture for innocent, ordinary people at the hands of the Khmer Rouge’. 13…”

“…Given the abstract portrayal of the Khmer Rouge, the category of an absence of a prior relationship is also assumed. At the same time, the victims are clearly perceived by visitors to TSGM as vulnerable and blameless for their presence , as is evidenced in many references to their innocence in visitor comments about the site (Buckley-Zistel and Williams, 2020). Given the totalitarian environment they were living in and the suffering they endured at S-21, it is certainly understandable to see these purged cadres of the Khmer Rouge as victims, but it is striking nonetheless that no mention is made of the fact that the majority of people killed had more complex biographies than one would expect from ideal victims.…”