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New perspectives on dark tourism
Edited by Avital Biran and Kenneth F. Hyde
Introduction
The act of travel to sites of death, disaster or the seemingly macabre - or what has commonly been referred to as dark tourism - is an increasingly pervasive feature within the contemporary visitor economy. Indeed, the commodification of death for popular touristic consumption, whether in the guise of memorials and museums, visitor attractions, special events and exhibitions, or specific tours, has become a focus for mainstream tourism providers. Dark tourism is concerned with tourist encounters with spaces of death or calamity that have perturbed the public consciousness, whereby actual and recreated places of the deceased, horror, atrocity, or depravity, are consumed through visitor experiences. Yet, the production of these "deathscapes" within the visitor economy and, consequently, the consumption of recent or distant trauma within a safe and socially sanctioned tourism environment, raises fundamental questions of the interrelationships between morality, mortality and contemporary approaches to death, dying, and (re)presentation of the dead. Over the past decade or so, an increasing media scrutiny of dark tourism and activities of so-called "dark tourists" has brought the interest of visiting deathscapes into the contemporary imagination. Moreover, academic probes into the principles and practices of dark tourism have ensured a growing area of scholarly endeavour which, in turn, has witnessed a burgeoning of resources for social science teaching and learning into the present-day commodification of death. Subsequently, dark tourism as a distinct focus of social scientific pedagogy is increasingly being delivered on a range of undergraduate and further education courses in colleges and universities across the world, as well as being a popular choice for postgraduate study ([51] Stone, 2011a).
Even though an increasing number of scholastic spotlights are now being shone on dark tourism as a contemporary visitor experience, the concept remains contested. Certainly, problematic issues with the typological and theoretical foundations of dark tourism raise complex issues regarding "dark heritage" and its representation and consumption. Furthermore, dark tourism provokes challenging debate over the relationships between "heritage that hurts" and how contemporary society deals with its significant Other dead. While dark tourism, in its broadest sense, can be considered dialogic and mediatory, the implications of dark tourism mediating death and the dead in modern...