Modernity on the beach: A postcolonial reading from southern shores

Abstract

The global spread of mass tourism is often understood in terms of the diffusion of practices first developed by English tourists and driven by the seemingly universal processes of urbanization and industrialization. This article offers a postcolonial critique of this approach, arguing it fails to appreciate the political and cultural dynamics of local adoption and remains blind to the role of alternative, indigenous practices. Moreover, as mass tourism practices are often viewed as expressions of modernity, societies are understood as modern only to the degree that they adopt northern European styles of leisure. Using Spain and Tunisia as examples, the article shows how the spread of beach tourism to the Mediterranean was shaped by geopolitical factors and imposed cultural and architectural expressions of modernity ill-suited to local contexts. Suggesting the value of alternative approaches, the article discusses forms of domestic coastal tourism in Morocco that express a modern hybrid Moroccan identity, in which a popular Islamic traditional ritual is performed and reinvented within the space of leisure beach tourism.

Towards Sustainable Development in Eco-based Tourism Destination: The Northwest of Tunisia

“…The spread of tourism in Tunisia similarly to several Mediterranean countries is shaped by geopolitical factors [10]. The main tourism regions of Sousse, Hammamet, Yasemine Hammamet, Mahdia and Sfax are situated in the coastal areas, with high economical and infrastructural development [11,12].…”

Beyond Eurocentrism in tourism: a paradigm shift to mobilities

“…Alneng, 2002;Hazbun, 2009;Winter, 2009a), which represents them as a residual category, and older terms, such as "developing countries" or "Third World countries," which seem antiquated in the contemporary globalized world. We have deployed the term to designate the Asian (Arlt, 2006a;Nyíri, 2006;Singh, 2009;Vaporis, 1995;Winter, Teo & Chang, 2009), Middle Eastern (Al-Hamarneh, 2005Aziz, 2001;Cai, Scott & Jafari, 2010), Latin American (Christotffoli, 2007dos Santos Filho, 2008;Samarchi, 2001) and sub-Saharan African regions (Mkono, 2011(Mkono, , 2013Rogerson & Lisu, 2005) of the world.…”

“…These were alleged to disregard the distinctive traits of tourism from the emerging (often related to as 'nonWestern') regions of the world (e.g. Alneng, 2002Alneng, , 2009Hazbun, 2009;Winter, 2009aWinter, , 2009b. The purpose of this article is to offer a conceptual framework that helps to overcome the Eurocentric bias in tourism studies, and thereby integrate the study of tourism from the "emerging regions" of the world, which have until recently been treated in modernist tourism studies mainly as destinations of the developed "West", into a paradigm that is unbiased by implicit Eurocentric assumptions.…”

The politics of pleasure: Promenading on the Corniche and beachgoing

“…The development of beaches and beach resort as places of bourgeois leisure in the Middle East has been traced to the early-to mid-twentieth century (Hazbun, 2010;Lagerquist, 2006), and Beirut seems to have preceded other eastern or southern Mediterranean cities in the development of its beaches. 8 On the cafes of Chiyah, Burj al-Barajna, and other southern suburban neighbourhoods, see Deeb and Harb, 2013.…”

“…That said, here I will also be touching on some recent works that examine leisure activities and spaces in exciting and provocative ways (inter alia Deeb and Harb, 2014;Hazbun, 2008;Junka, 2006;Menoret, 2014).…”