Travel Worlds: Journeys in Contemporary Cultural Politics

Tackling the dearth of politically-engaged work on travel and tourism, this book provides a counter-narrative of travel-worlds shaped by divergent legacies: of colonialism, crusades, migration, diaspora, displacement, tourism, ethnography, political insurgency and transnationalization. The issues addressed include: north-south traffic in hip hop, Kung-Fu and sex tourism; missionaries in India, academics in the west; Saint George as an Arab soldier in The Crusades; the Indian-Pakistan border, displacement and defiance; mobile resistance to nation-state hegemonies in Bangladesh; the international market value of dead tourists; pop personalities, MTV and souvenir culture; diasporized Mirpuri youth on travel; touring black women, pleasure islands; and ethnographers abroad. Such diverse journeys are plotted using counter-hegemonic perspectives on the politics and practice of travel.