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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Revisiting 'township tourism': multiple mobilities and the re-territorialisation of township spaces in Cape Town, South Africa
Author:Dickson, Jessica L.
Year:2012
Periodical:Anthropology Southern Africa (ISSN 2332-3264)
Volume:35
Issue:1-2
Pages:31-39
Language:English
Geographic term:South Africa
Subjects:tourism
townships
mobility
social environment
Abstract:This article explores themes of social space and mobility significant to tourism within the townships near Cape Town, South Africa. Research on the emergence of 'township tourism' has produced contrasting interpretations. Some authors describe essentialized notions of 'Africanness', 'culture', and poverty displayed for the consumption of European tourists as voyeurism. Others emphasize township tourism's grassroots potential for local development, and portray it as a form of reconciliation through the political and personal narratives shared between resident-guides and tourists. By focusing primarily on one family of township tourism 'hosts', the findings describe how those involved with township tourism utilized new avenues of social and physical mobility across sociospatial boundaries that persist as legacies of apartheid. Flexible understandings of space and 'multiple mobilities' are considered, and host agency is emphasized. Finally, by tracing public discourses of criminality and 'common sense' directed at international visitors to townships in 2010, the author demonstrates how such narratives undermine efforts to reconfigure perceptions of township spaces. She concludes by arguing that township tourism carries the potential to map new cartographies of belonging, while also creating new exclusions. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract]
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