Abstract: Whilst this is foremost a book about theatre and theatricality, it rests upon the consideration of a particular kind of tourist practice, which I characterize as 'audience to absence'. Both theatre and dark tourism are haunted by absence and, each in their own manner, traffic in substitutes that attempt to make such absence present, to make it felt. This chapter explores a series of questions that lay down the terms of enquiry for subsequent chapters: What is dark tourism and what might motivate it? In what sense is it theatrical? How might we understand the various roles that tourists take on in relation to the sites discussed? What kinds of theatrical practices speak to the dialectic of absence and presence that this book seeks to read in ethical terms. As Kellee Caton's comment above, drawn from her survey article, makes clear, an elaboration of what is at stake in the instances of tourism examined has ethical implications for the broader analysis of spectatorship at hand. Laurie Beth Clark, also quoted above, similarly suggests that tourism is one of the ways in which we attempt to approach and understand otherness. This chapter takes up the questions that dark tourism generates and considers them from an explicitly theatrical perspective. Theatricality, for this purpose, is understood as an animating force that traffics in paradoxes and contradiction: it calls into presence that which is absent, whilst at the same time always revealing the incompleteness of the invocation.KeywordsStreet SceneEthical TermOntological SecurityMemorial SiteMemorial MuseumThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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