Description
Book SynopsisThis book—ideal for African and world history classes, as well as for potential travelers to the continent—takes readers on a journey through the dynamics of Africa’s tourist history from the nineteenth century to the present to illuminate and challenge deeply ingrained (mis)perceptions about the continent and its peoples.
Trade Review“Ready for adventure under control? Cleveland’s book invites us to explore the experiences and meanings of tourism in Africa and its profound impact on how the continent is imagined. It also provides a different reading of Western modernity as a producer of otherness through one of its most profitable products: tourism, where verbs such as to travel become to explore and to discover, preserving the allure of colonial sagas and developmental missions. Experience of difference, heritage, traditions, nature, wildlife, and community culture, have been and are (re)shaped, tailored, commodified, and contested in complex and conflicting local-global power relations from the nineteenth century under the dynamics of tourism in the continent. Their impact on African lives is a capital ingredient of this journey confronting artificial Africas with the realities that the tourism industry produces.” -- Mónica Inés Cejas, author of Feminismo, cultura y política: El contexto como acertijo (Feminism, Culture and Politics: Context as a Riddle)
“Todd Cleveland brings together significant facets of tourist history on the African continent into one engaging read. Whereas many tourist studies focus on the tourist, vitally, A History of Tourism in Africa illuminates the myriad competing desires at play in all tourist sites—those of tourists, governments, laborers, and local communities. By presenting these competing perspectives on tourism within the thematic frames of his chapters, Cleveland reveals the complicated nature of African tourist industries, as well as how, from the start, they have been interwoven with the history of socio-politico-economic developments across the continent.” -- Carol L. Magee, author of Urban Cadence: Street Scenes from Lagos and Johannesburg
"A seminal and meticulously presented study … [and] an inherently fascinating and impressively informative history. Exceptionally well written, organized and presented, A History of Tourism in Africa is an original and unreservedly recommended addition to personal, professional, community, college, and university library collections in African history and cultural anthropology in general, and African hospitality, travel, and tourism supplemental curriculum studies lists in particular. * Midwest Book Review *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Touristic Illusions and Realities
1. Initial Touristic Incursions to Africa
2. Hunting in Africa: Invisible Guides, Big Game, and Bigger Egos
3. Profits and Propaganda: Tourism in Colonial Africa
4. Paradoxes of Independence: Modernizing by Promoting Primitivism
5. The Touristic Invention of the African Camera Safari
6. Going Home: The Diasporic Quest for Belonging through “Roots” Tourism
7. Controversial New(er) Forms of Tourism in Africa
Study Guide and Selected Readings
Notes
Index
