Description
Book SynopsisEach year, approximately a million tourists visit slum areas on guided tours as a part of their holiday to Asia, Africa or Latin America. This book analyses the cultural encounters that take place between slum tourists and former street children, who work as tour guides for a local NGO in Delhi, India.
Slum tours are typically framed as both tourist performances, bought as commodities for a price on the market, and as appeals for aid that tourists encounter within an altruistic discourse of charity. This book enriches the tourism debate by interpreting tourist performances as affective economies, identifying tour guides as emotional labourers and raising questions on the long-term impacts of economically unbalanced encounters with representatives of the Global North, including the researcher.
This book studies the feeling rules' governing a slum tour and how they shape interactions. When do guides permit tourists to exoticise the slum and feel a thr
Trade Review
"Through this book we come to learn more about the circumstances that together construct the particular spatial environment known as the slum, the representations of Delhi’s street children that become fixed as a part of the guides’ identities and performances, the aestheticization of the slum, and the complex interplays in the co-performances that are the tours. It provides a compelling and insightful lens into the intersections of the complex objectives and impacts of encounters between poverty and tourism."- Meghan Muldoon, Arizona State University
Table of Contents1. Slum Tourism, Subalternity and Gentrification 2. The Authentic Slum or Former Street Children as Prisms of Authenticity? 3. Playing with Privilege? The Ethics of Aestheticizing the Slum 4 The Affective Economy of Slum Tourism 5. The Post-Humanitarian Logic of Slum Tourism 6 The Emotional Labour of CW-Guides 7 The Economy of Resocialisation: The Slumming Researcher? Conclusion and Further Perspectives
