Abstract

This book investigates ‘home’ and ‘homeland’ as destinations of touristic journeys and adds to recent scholarly interest in the intersection between tourism and migration. It covers the temporary visits and journeys in search of home and homelands by migrants, displaced people, exiles and diasporic communities in a wide range of different geographical and historical contexts. Personal and collective forms of memory are shown to play a key role in the motivation for, and experience of, such journeys. The volume contributes to the investigation of the tourism–memory nexus as it conceptualizes memory as underpinning touristic mobility, experience and performativity.  Based on ethnographic case studies and other types of qualitative empirical research, the chapters of this book foreground individual touristic experiences, emotions, memories, perceptions, the search for identity and a sense of belonging. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of tourism, heritage, anthropology, identity studies, memory studies and migration/diaspora studies.

Sabine Marschall is Associate Professor of Cultural and Heritage Tourism, School of Social Sciences, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Her research interests include memory, commemoration, heritage and heritage tourism.

Curiosity or yearning for 'home' is the theme of this rich collection of essays on the links between tourism, memory, and cultural identity. Germans visiting pre-1945 birthplaces, Israelis touring family sites from pre-Holocaust Europe, Palestinians viewing pre-1948 villages, African-Americans exploring origins in Ghana, all exemplify commonalities in roots tourism. All, however, plus other cases in this deeply moving book, express different senses of homeland and loss.

Rich in evocative case studies from around the globe, Marschall’s collection charts a course through diverse fields of study (tourism, migration, mobility, transnationalism, globalisation), and breaks new ground in updating and extending conceptualisations of the ever disparate but always heartfelt process of journeying home. In a world increasingly defined by mobility, the counterpoints of home and memory are important conceptual innovations featured in this work.

Tourism and Memories of Home represents a valuable and welcome addition to the
growing body of research on diaspora tourism. The thirteen chapters challenge and deepen our understanding of how diasporas from around the world invert and reinterpret the concept of ‘home and away’ (...) It is a valuable and powerful teaching resource for students studying on a wide range of social science disciplines, as well as for professionals interested in understanding and developing ethical diasporic tourism products.

This book serves as a valuable resource for scholars interested in the intersection of tourism and migration. Although neglected, this field proves to be very important for a large spectrum of researchers and academics. However, the beauty of this book is actually in its universality, for almost every human knows what nostalgia, memory and home means. This makes the book’s audience unlimited, as the book can be read, understood and enjoyed without being an expert in tourism, heritage or anthropology. While taking the joint journey back to one’s past we learn that roots tourism is a means through which we explore personal identities
grounded in collective memories. This rich set of stories full of emotionally charged experiences will ultimately cause the reader to reflect on his own life.