Staging Visitation
Tourist Performances and Theatricalized Places
How tourism becomes a site for the performance of identity
Description
Staging Visitation frames tourism and travel as complex social performances that shape identities, communities, and global imaginaries. This volume proposes “visitation” as a framework that emphasizes the participatory and relational dimensions of travel. While tourism is often pejoratively framed as a commodified or exploitative leisure activity for those with means, its reality is far more nuanced. Tourism stages heritage, provokes encounters across cultural divides, and prompts both visitors and hosts to negotiate values and identities—all while sustaining economies (and the power relations they produce) at global and local scales.
From museums and theme parks to festivals and influencer culture, the essays in this volume trace how transitory encounters—embodied, affective, and historically layered—build travel destinations into theatricalized places. These essays bring theater and performance studies into conversation with cultural geography, sociology, anthropology, and media studies to demonstrate how tourism functions as both a stage and a repertoire for modern life.
Staging Visitation argues that travel is not only about movement across space, but also about the performance of culture itself—its preservation, reinvention, and transformation.
Bryan W. Schmidt is Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor of Theatre at the College of William & Mary.
Weston Twardowski is Associate Director of the Center for Environmental Studies and the Sustainability Institute’s EcoStudio at Rice University.
Reviews
“Schmidt and Twardowski have assembled an impressive array of essays written by well-established scholars in the field of tourism studies. Collectively, they analyze tourism through paradigms of immersion, identity formation, and performative experimentation.The book engages with tourism on several planes while thoughtfully considering how humans experience visitation in both real and imaginary worlds. From safaris and ‘Afronauts’ to historical reenactments in London parks, the collection demonstrates how travel encounters shift perception and reinforce prescribed imaginaries. This book will surely become a foundational source for those investigating how performance visitation satiates human curiosity for understanding the ‘other.’”
- Anita Gonzalez, Georgetown University
“Staging Visitation is an excellent addition to the emerging field of tourism and performance. Readers who are new to this subtopic or want to do a ‘Grand Tour’ of the area would come away from this book familiar with a breadth of approaches and models. This is the perfect volume for scholars just beginning to develop an interest in tourism and performance.”
- Jenny Kokai, University of South Florida
“The diverse essays collected in this volume offer vividly presented, accessible, and evocative case studies for readers wanting to think productively about tourism as ‘visitation’—an affective, performative staging of co-presence between hosts and guests that can be seen to construct, transmit, and reify ideas of community and culture.”
- Sharon Mazer, Auckland University of Technology