Middle Eastern Tourism Gets a Book-Based Boost
Tunis
We are excited about two new books out focusing on Middle Eastern tourism. Just by reading the book review by Ted Swedenburg of University of Arkansas, it makes us want to run out and get them. We’ve included a few excerpts from his excellent and comprehensive review:
“Waleed Hazbun’s Beaches, Ruins, Resorts: The Politics of Tourism in the Arab World and Rebecca Stein’s Itineraries in Conflict: Israelis, Palestinians and the Political Lives of Tourism are groundbreaking studies of tourism in the Middle East. Both are noteworthy for demonstrating tourism’s critical importance for a deeper understanding of political and economic processes in the region. Hazbun establishes that tourism is key to a better comprehension of the dynamics of globalization in the Middle East, while Stein shows that the practices and discourses of tourism offer critical insights into how Israeli national identity was reimagined during the height of the “peace process.” If they receive the audience they truly deserve, these volumes should give a significant boost to the status of tourism studies within Middle East studies.
“In Tunisia, tourism has been key to the survival and vitality of the dictatorial regime of President Zine El Abdine Ben Ali, who seized power in 1987. Tourism not only furnishes substantial revenues for the state, but it has also helped to construct and perpetuate an image of the country as open, secular, and pluralistic, as a kind of cultural bridge between the East and the West.
“Since the 1980s, Tunisian tourism has witnessed substantial “reterritorialization,” or an assertion of local economic interests, and the state has spurred this transformation. It has promoted tourist development that emphasizes local culture and heritage, nature tourism, and eco-tourism. It has used tourism to mitigate regional differences within Tunisia, by encouraging the development of tourism throughout the country, including peripheral and economically underdeveloped zones. The state has fostered the building of integrated tourism complexes that are oriented inward, providing everything tourists might desire on site. According to Hazbun, such projects serve to prevent the most negative sorts of socio-cultural and environmental impacts that often accompany foreign visitors.
“Dubai is the most spectacular post-9/11 winner, a city whose image is tied up with tourism like an upscale Las Vegas. It attracts a diverse clientele, with British visitors first on the list. In the past few years, Dubai has had immense publicity success with high-profile projects, such as indoor skiing facilities, the iconic Burj Hotel, and plans to open branches of the Louvre and the Guggenheim museums designed by top-drawer architects, all receiving overwhelmingly favorable coverage in the Western media. Commentators like Thomas Friedman have come to regard Dubai, with its reputation as a “cosmopolitan oasis,” as a model for Middle Eastern globalization, through economic liberalization, “dynamic free trade zones,” and “sound economic management” (p. 213). It is as if the specter of Islamic terrorism has helped transform the negative stereotype of the “rich Arab oilman” into a positive one. Yet Hazbun reveals that Dubai’s fabled cosmopolitan spaces are anything but open. Instead, they are rigidly controlled, carefully segregating Dubai’s workers (mostly migrants from South and Southeast Asia) from the contained spaces reserved for tourists. Moreover, the state has successfully purchased its citizens’ acquiescence by extending almost free housing, due to its near total control over urban development and land rights.
“Dubai has emerged as the most successful tourism model in the Middle East, a kind of enclave where tourists are insulated, where security for visitors–a priority since 9/11–is highly visible, and where the potential negative social and cultural impacts of tourism are mitigated. Since the book was published, the Dubai economy has collapsed, though the tourism model remains an eminently viable one, as recent reports of the revival of Beirut’s nightlife niche tourism (now depicted as gay-friendly) suggest.
Neither Stein nor Hazbun are under any illusion that tourism automatically leads to “greater understanding” or “cultural contact,” and both astutely demonstrate the limits to such a simplistic notion. Yet neither dismiss tourism offhandedly.
“Hazbun also makes some brief, but very useful, suggestions in his conclusion, about how tourism in the Arab world might be made truly open, by moving away from enclave tourism, fostering more people-to-people contact, and encouraging a greater overlap of tourism and non-tourism spaces.”
Cool, right? We love how these books seem to get to the heart of mindful tourism – education, culture, and local control/input. Read the entire review here. Pritty, pritty, pritty good.
