Death tourism : disaster sites as recreational landscape /
edited by Brigitte Sion.
- ix, 337 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Part 1. Tourism and/as memory -- Part 2. Exhibiting death -- Part 3. Negotiating return -- Part 4. Identity politics -- -- Introduction / Tourism and/as memory -- Ethical spaces: ethics and propriety in trauma tourism / Trauma as durational performance: a walk through Villa Grimaldi, Santiago Chile / The Manhattan Project Time Machine: atomic tourism in Oak Ridge, Tennesse / Exhibiting death -- Conflicting sites of memory in post-genocide Cambodia / Resisting Holocaust tourism: the new gedennnkstatte at Bergen-Belsen, Germany / From evidence to relic to artifact: curating in the aftermath of 11 September 2001 / Negotiating return -- Noshing at the Necropolis: trauma, gastrotourism and Jewish cultural memory / Sites of absence and presence: tourism and the morbid material culture of death in Brittany / The Navy Mechanics School (ESMA) and the politics of trauma tourism in Argentina / From shrine to theme park: the house of terror in Budapaest, Hungary / Identity politics -- Borderline memory disorder: Trieste and the staging of Italian national identity / Return to Alcatraz: dark tourism and the representation of prison history / Between violence and romance: gorillas, genocide and Rwandan tourism / Welcome to Sarajevo! Touring The Powder Keg / Brigette Sion -- -- Laurie Beth Clark -- Diana Taylor -- Lindsay A. Freeman -- -- Brigitte Sion -- Rainer Schulze -- Mark Schaming -- -- S.I.Salamensky -- Maura Coughlin -- Cara L. Levey -- Aniko Szucs -- -- Susanne C. Knittel -- Mary Rachel Gould -- Stephanie Mckinney -- Patrick Naef. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4.
"Auschwitz. Hiroshima. Cambodia's killing fields. The World Trade Center. The mass graves of Rwanda. These places of violent death have become part of the recreational landscape of tourism, an industry that is otherwise dedicated to pleasure and escape. In dark places like concentration camps, prisons, battlegrounds, and the sites of natural disasters, how are memory and trauma mediated by thanotourism, or tourism of death? In Death Tourism, Brigitte Sion brings together essays by some of the most trenchant voices in the field to look at the tensions created by the juxtaposition of human remains and food stands, political agendas and educational programs, economic development and architectural ambition. How does a state redefine its national identity after catastrophic trauma? And what is the role of this kind of tourism in defining their new identity? A timely volume on an irresistible subject, this inquiry exposes the intersection of leisure with the inhumane, giving insight into how people respectfully share a public space that is both free and sacred, compelling and tragic."--Publisher's website. Papers presented at the Conference 'Death/Dark/Thanatourism' at New York University in April 2010.