Abstract
Four papers on tourism in Asia constitute this issue. Thus, the first issue of 2023 offers our readers a platform to reflect upon Asian critical tourism scholarship and the journal’s support of this growing area within tourist studies.
A call for Asian tourism scholarship in post-COVID-19 or still-viral times
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, tourism economies in Asia were booming in ways unimagined previously. References to ‘The Asian Century’, a term invented by former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping to proclaim the foreseeable economic triumph of the continent, signalled the traction gained by tourism research on Asia in terms of the quantity of articles published in international as well as domestic platforms (Sin et al., 2021). ‘Asia’ is a tricky term. The cultural and economic diversity of Asia and its imprecise and contested borders make definitions a daunting task, yet shared challenges and opportunities do unite Asia as a constellation of peoples and places. While the coronavirus disease in 2020 put a stop both to the momentum of Asian tourism and tourism research underway at the time, in 2023 at Tourist Studies we now see possibilities emerging from the painful shadows of the pandemic – possibilities to build back the scholarship theoretically, methodologically and empirically.
Tourism scholarship in Asia started off on the backs of Anglo-western concepts and methodologies (Winter, 2009). On top of cultural and societal mismatches between the context of Asia and the European/Western situations (in the array of humanistic, Marxist, feminist, post-structural, postmodern and ontological theories that critical tourism scholars have engaged with), arguments for the field to be decolonised are loud and clear. A political economy of critical tourism scholarship has hindered conceptual pluralism.
At Tourist Studies we are motivated in this historical moment shaped by both COVID-19 and decolonisation to ‘build back better’. We support scholarship on Asian tourism that encompasses hope, creative conceptual formations and emancipatory actions. Specifically, we advocate for inquiry into the distress, hope and the pathways out of our societies and planet’s challenges offered by Asian tourism scholars and scholars working on tourism in Asia. We are enthused about critical frameworks that both interrogate the structures of injustice and capture the rapid-fast post- or still-viral pandemic lives and mobilities in Asia as well as Asia’s interactions with other places and peoples. Our aim is to promote critical and conceptually-driven empirical scholarship that might provide an array of blueprints for emancipation and empowerment in these times.
The recent state of Asian tourism scholarship in Tourist Studies
Critical Asian tourism studies see critical tourism scholarship in Asia as a means to rectify Anglo-western centrism and to bring about new approaches, methodologies and theories that will help us to better understand Asian societies and their tourism (Chang, 2021; Winter, 2009). Tourist Studies has taken this direction by reviewing and publishing works on tourism in Asia and its interactions with peoples and places beyond. Very often, this involves going beyond ‘product lifecycle models’ and notions of tourism as a market and commodity.
When engaging with western concepts, authors in Tourist Studies have mediated between the concepts, their original assumptions and the differing contexts of the places being studies. For instance, some articles have attended to the adaptation of western-derived ocular-centric notions of ‘the gaze’ (Law et al., 2007; Moufakkir, 2019) and other articles have allowed for indigenous notions of host-guest relations to emerge (Nanjangud and Reijnders, 2022; Yuk Wah, 2006). Nuanced accounts of tourism embodiments provide in-depth and pluralistic narratives of tourism in Asia or of Asians (Nanjangud and Reijnders, 2022; Peyvel, 2021; Yuan, 2022). From real-world Asian tourists sensing and experiencing the social aspects of food (Lin et al., 2021) to fictional Kazakh journalist Borat’s make-believe journey (Tzanelli, 2021), authors have shown how tourism can be a vehicle for the interrogation of converging as well as conflicting societal values and cultural processes.
The western-derived notions of performativity and practices and/or social constructionist interpretation of social practices have influenced this body of scholarship too. Articles consider the ways in which Chinese volunteer tourists interpret their experiences (Yu and Na, 2022), how Chinese package tours have persisted but also have changed in relevancy (Ren, 2022), what democracy protest tourism looks like in Hong Kong (Shim et al., 2022) and how tourism has shaped the quality of life for different social groups in Macao (Choe et al., 2021). The issue of power, conflict and violence in Asian tourism has been examined (Ahmad, 2022; Guo and Jordan, 2022; Shim et al., 2022; Wight and Victoria, 2022) as well as the strong role of social media in China tourism (Connell et al., 2021).
Volume 23 Issue 1
Tourist Studies continues to support the critical tourism studies project in Asia by publishing scholarship that adopts perspectives that mediate between maintaining a dialogue across internationally recognised theories, concepts and methodologies and encouraging locally and regionally derived conceptualisations. The current issue is a continued step along this trajectory.
Tourist Studies has always published critical works on gender and tourism, from theoretical interrogations of gender, theory and tourism (Aitchison, 2001, 2005) to feminist calls for reforms in ways in which gender roles manifest in tourism (Everingham et al., 2021; Frohlick, 2005; Mattsson, 2022; Veijola, 2009). The first article of this issue draws on the negotiations of gender representations seen in online advertisements for Chinese and Thai martial arts destinations. To move beyond western-centric notions of ‘self-Orientalism’, Jiange Deng (2023) advances the concept ‘Asian masculine landscapes’ or AMLs. Deng achieves this by focusing on the productive roles of image makers of this genre of tourism and their agencies and freedoms in gender and tourism-related discourse making. In the second article, Chin-Ee Ong, April Simin Xu and Stephanie Xueke Yang’s (2023) work on the assemblage of Chinese tourism at Dajiuzhai, a place of splendid valleyscapes and charismatic pandas, analyses disruptions to Chinese tourism at a time of the COVID-19 pandemic using French-derived post-structuralism and actor-network theory. The strict but fickle pandemic control measures, they demonstrated, offers an example from which other tourism scholars might develop the notions of vulnerability and precarity within our socio-material worlds. The third article is also set in China. Author Qingming Cui (2023) offers an important intervention against western-centric understandings of couchsurfing. This close examination of the notion of ‘guanxi’, defined as trust and interpersonal relationships with Chinese characteristics, places a Chinese concept in relation to a universalistic notion of trust implicit to ‘global couchsurfing’, thereby allowing a nuanced and empirically-grounded view to emerge. Building onto this journal’s strength in critical Vietnamese tourism research from Vietnamese styled ‘Red Tourism’ or ‘Recreational Communism’ (Peyvel, 2021) to urban motorbike mobilities as a slice of Vietnamese modernity (Gillen, 2016), the fourth article by Dong and Nguyen (2023) looks at the issue of resident-driven pushback against tourism development in Vietnam. Their account traces out various expressions of power that was mobilised successfully by previously ignored stakeholders who were against government-authorised sustainable tourism initiatives in Da Nang, central Vietnam. This piece is helpful in understanding how stakeholder politics operate and offers both a cautionary tale and a hopeful glimpse of community-engaged approaches to tourism development.
We trust that readers will find in these four articles, separately and as a set, insights into current trends in what is happening in Asia with respect to tourism and tourists as well as into Asian tourism scholars’ desires to move tourism research in particular directions. Enjoy! We also wish to acknowledge the expertise and efforts of our many peer reviewers. Without their/your generosity of time and knowledge, peer-reviewed publishing is simply not possible.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Author biographies
