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Tourist Utopias

Offshore Islands, Enclave Spaces, and Mobile Imaginaries

Timothy Simpson Keller Easterling Pál Nyíri Daniel Goh Yasser Elsheshtawy Angela Ndalianis Benjamin Kidder Hodges Margaret Werry Adam Lampton Veronica Dora

9789089648471
228 pages
Amsterdam University Press
Overview
Released on the 500-year anniversary of the publication of Sir Thomas More's Utopia, this volume seeks to adapt and apply More's fecund imagination to the contemporary leisure landscape. The contributors to this volume theorize and analyze a variety of 'tourist utopias' - a nascent socio-spatial form crucial to a post-industrial global economy. From Disney World to Dubai, 'Middle Earth' to Marina Bay, Macau to Abu Dhabi, these sites share common characteristics that include their respective status as 'spaces of exception'; entrepreneurial governance regimes that rely on cooperation among state and non-state actors; transient, multinational populations; immaterial and affective forms of labor and consumption; superlative and iconic architecture; and economies devoted to such leisure activities as shopping, gambling, and spectacle. These locales are not only popular destinations for migrant workers and mobile tourists from around the globe, but also serve as cultural laboratories for testing new formats and protocols of an emergent post-Fordist form-of-life.
Author Bio
Tim Simpson is Associate Professor of Communication, and Associate Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Macau, where he has worked since 2001. He is the co-author (with photographer Roger Palmer) of the volume Macao Macau (Black Dog Publishing).