Geoforum 86 (2017) 127–135

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Geoforum

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Touristic disaster: Spectacle and recovery in Post-Katrina New Orleans MARK Kevin Fox Gotham Tulane University, Newcomb Hall, Room 215, New Orleans, LA 70118, United States

ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT

Keyword: This paper develops the concept touristic disaster as a heuristic device to examine the conflictual and contra- Spectacle disaster recovery tours dictory aspects of showcasing disaster-devastated neighborhoods as tourist attractions. Touristic disaster refers to the application of tourism modes of staging, visualization, and discourse to reenchant the money making deterrents (stigma) of “destruction” and “ruin” and re-signify disaster to indicate “recovery” and “rebirth.” This paper uses empirical examples from New Orleans to examine the transition from “” to “recovery tourism” in tourism framings of post-Katrina rebuilding. The concept of touristic disaster views disaster-deva- stated neighborhoods as sites and arenas of contestation in which opposing groups and interests battle to control representations of urban space. The paper illustrates the motivations, processes, and paradoxical impacts of the commodification and global representation of “disaster” and “recovery” and provides insights into the ways in which people can use spectacle to contest marginalization.

1. Introduction the burgeoning growth of trauma-related and misery-laden attractions and their interconnection with different political, social, and cultural This paper investigates the conflictual and contradictory aspects of institutions and processes. showcasing disaster-devastated neighborhoods as tourist attractions, For decades, New Orleans has been one of the world’s most popular using a case study of the post-Katrina rebuilding process in New tourist and destinations, drawing approximately nine mil- Orleans. Entertaining sites, attractions, and spectacular events linked to lion visitors per year in the years before (Gotham, death, suffering, violence, and disaster have long attracted curious 2007a). With a variety of entertainment venues, celebrated festivals, visitors and consumers. Roman gladiatorial fights, public executions niche tours, historical and cultural heritage sites, and other attractions, and hangings, and to graveyards and battlefields are a few the city and region had acquired a reputation as a place of fun, enjoy- of the early forms of trauma-related entertainment and spectacle (Lisle, ment, and unquestioned authenticity. Before Hurricane Katrina, 2006; Seaton, 2002; Stone, 2011, 2006; Tarlow, 2005). Over the last tourism was a $5.5 billion dollar industry that accounted for 40 percent century, the linkages among human misery, entertainment, and tourism of the city's tax revenues and employed 85,000 people. The levee have become both widespread and diverse. In recent years, scholars and breaches caused by Hurricane Katrina flooded 80 percent of the experts have focused their attention on examining the growing including hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses and con- phenomenon “”, described by Stone (2006, p. 146) as “the tributed to more than 1400 deaths. While the main tourist areas - the act of to sites associated with death, suffering and the seemingly French Quarter, Garden District, and Uptown - escaped major flooding macabre.” War-related attractions, war commemorations, and war and suffered only minor wind damage, the tourism sector lost ap- museums have proliferated in the twentieth century and represent a proximately 22,900 jobs. After Hurricane Katrina, visitor numbers subset of the totality of tourist sites associated with death and suffering. dropped to 3.7 million in 2006, with $2.9 billion in visitor spending Tourism scholars have noted the variety of disaster-related or death- (Gotham, 2007b). Since the disaster, political and economic elites and related sights and specific destinations including Ground Zero in New local and regional tourism organizations have attempted to expel ne- York City, the Sixth Floor in Dallas (Texas), graveyards, Nazi con- gative impressions, neutralize the stigma of disaster, and create a more centration camps, and slavery-heritage tourist sites. More recently, favorable destination brand image using sophisticated marketing stra- tours have emerged as an expanding business in cities, an activity tegies (Gotham and Greenberg, 2014, chapter 6). According to data that insinuates urban poverty as a consumable commodity (Dürr, 2012; gathered by the Morial , the city hosted 111 events at Freire-Mederios, 2013, 2009; Jaffe et al., 2012; Jones and Sanyal, 2015; the Morial Convention Center in 2008, an all-time high. Just over nine Meschkank, 2010). These and many other examples are illustrative of million tourists and business travelers spent a record $6.81 billion in

E-mail address: [email protected]. URL: http://tulane.edu/liberal-arts/kevin-gotham.cfm. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.09.005 Received 10 April 2017; Received in revised form 1 August 2017; Accepted 9 September 2017 0016-7185/ © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. K.F. Gotham Geoforum 86 (2017) 127–135

New Orleans in 2014, the highest ever, according to a study completed e.g., death, atrocity, disaster, slum, and poverty - are not fixed and by the University of New Orleans (UNO) Hospitality Research Center static. Rather, these terms are subject to alteration and transformation for the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau (CVB) and New according to specific intentions, contexts and political purposes. Whe- Orleans Tourism Marketing Corporation (NOTMC) (Bristol and Sinclair, ther we are studying , disaster tourism, or other forms of 2015). dark tourism, we are confronted by controversial practice and growing This paper develops the concept of touristic disaster as a heuristic commercial activity in which processes of commodification and aes- device to reveal the ways in which different organizations apply theticization intertwine with human misery to shape urban imaginaries tourism modes of discourse, visualization, and staging to narrate and and the built environment. showcase disaster-devastated neighborhoods as spectacles of tourist Many scholars acknowledge the touristification of socio-spatial sites consumption. Most of the literature that examines the linkages among related to death, poverty, and disaster but they disagree over the costs disaster and tourism either adopts a social psychological perspective to and benefits for the victims and disadvantaged, the historical devel- examine tourists’ motivations and experiences when visiting disaster opment and actual application of commodification processes, and the areas (see, e.g., Biran et al., 2014; Rittichainuwat, 2008; Yan et al., residual effects of tourism on cities and urban life. In an oft-cited book 2016) or a management perspective, focusing on tourism industry re- on slum tourism, Freire-Medeiros (2013, p. 167) maintains that the covery and rebranding (e.g. Amujo and Otubanjo, 2012; Mair et al., “curiosity to gaze at the poor has been commoditized and completely 2016; Morrish et al., 2016; Orchiston and Higham, 2016 for an over- incorporated into the logic of the neoliberal model of market-based view, see Cohen and Cohen, 2012, p. 2189). Moreover, there is a wide economic development and social organization.” In embracing the range of terms used to describe the visitation to sites and attractions “mobility turn” in studies of the urban poor, Dürr (2012) and Jaffe et al. associated to death and suffering including “black-spot tourism” (Rojek, (2012) situate the development of slum tourism in the context of the 1993), “thanatourism” (Seaton, 1996, 1999), “tragic tourism” (Lippard, transnational mobility of representations of urban poverty. For Dürr 2000) “toxic tourism” (Pezzullo, 2009c), and “grief tourism” (Trotta, (2012, p. 707), slum tourism “creates new spaces of both representation 2006), to name a few. and cross-cultural encounter, however coined by uneven power-rela- I argue that the concept of touristic disaster draws our attention to tions and economic conditions.” Going further, Dürr (2012, p. 709) previously overlooked aspects of the tourism-disaster relationship and suggests that “key marketing tools in the tourist industry, are always helps focus our attention on areas of investigation that have not re- related to power and ideology. They mediate places and peoples in ceived much theoretical or empirical attention. First, the concept di- particular ways and shape imaginaries of the social world in accord rects our inquiry to identifying and explaining the conflictual and with specific interests and projects.” In this vein, scholars have called contradictory nature of (re)presenting disaster-devastated neighbor- for a consideration of the power dynamics and larger political-economic hoods as tourist attractions. Second, the concept operates as a heuristic context in order to understand the ways that various forms of dark device to reveal the processes by which people (re)construct spaces of tourism – e.g., disaster tourism, slum tourism, and so on – operate and disaster and destruction as spaces of recovery and rebuilding, an ana- represent places, residents, and other subjects of interest to tourists. lytical focus and orientation that is absent from the term dark tourism In this paper, I use the notion of the “society of the spectacle” de- and related concepts. In this paper, I examine the discursive shift from veloped by French theorist Guy Debord to illuminate the paradoxes and “disaster tourism” to “recovery tourism” in tourism framings of post- contradictions of (re)presenting disaster-impacted neighborhoods as disaster space. Drawing on ethnographic field observations and inter- tourist attractions. In the Society of the Spectacle and other essays, views, the paper illustrates the ways in which disaster-devastated Debord (1994, 1957) developed the thesis of the “spectacle” as a new neighborhoods can become sites and arenas of contestation in which stage in the development of modern capitalism that marks a shift from a opposing groups and interests battle to control representations of re- commodity producing society to an image producing society dominated sidential space and use spectacle to contest marginalization. by advertising, entertainment, television and mass media, and other culture industries. In the spectacle, “life is presented as an immense 2. Disaster, tourism, and spectacle accumulation of spectacles” (#1), social relations become mediated by images, and separation and estrangement become the dominant con- Recent years have witnessed an explosion of scholarship that ex- ditions of existence. The spectacle corresponds to the omnipresence of amines the ways in which governments, private actors and organiza- the commodity where social life becomes “blanketed by substratum tions, and tourism boosters have worked to represent and transform after substratum of commodities” (#42) to the extent that images and sites of human pain, death, and trauma into spectacles of consumption appearances come to constitute reality. The problem, according to and entertainment. Variously referred to as dark tourism or thana- Debord, is “not just that the relationship to commodities is now plain to tourism, tourism scholars have examined a broad and growing range of see” but that “commodities are now all that there is to see; the world we activities that highlight the appeal of sites of death, destruction, and see is the world of the commodity” (#42, emphasis in original). The other great atrocities (Lennon and Foley, 2000; Stone, 2006; Stone and totalization of commodification represents the abstraction and mysti- Sharpley, 2008). Examples of dark tourism include prison tourism fication of reality, where people become spectators of their own lives, (Strange and Kempa, 2003), crime tourism (Zerva, 2013), battlefield or assigned to roles that subject them to a condition of quiescence, ato- (Lisle, 2006, 2007), slavery- (Mowatt and mization, stupefaction, and conformity. Chancellor, 2011) and genocide or (Biran et al., Building on Debord’s work and theorizations of spectacle, I develop 2011). Slum tourism is travel to poverty impacted places in which the heuristic device touristic disaster to show how (re)presenting dis- various tourism organizations and tour companies reconstruct and (re) aster-devastated neighborhoods as tourist attractions can give rise to present impoverished neighborhoods to tourists as valued attractions conflicting meanings and paradoxical effects. The concept provides (Freire-Medeiros, 2013, 2009; Frenzel and Koens, 2012, 2016; insight into how (re)presentations of disaster and human misery can Meschkank, 2011; Scheyvens, 2007, 2001). Disaster tourism refers to provide opportunities for collective action and political mobilization to tourist activities, sites, and sights that are connected to a major trau- challenge the status quo. Debord’s theorization of the spectacle has matic event. While some scholars focus attention on consumer demand inspired much research on the different forms and technologies of as a driving force of dark tourism, others examine the ways in which spectacle, the specific urban manifestations and socio-spatial con- tourism practitioners and marketers seek to reconstruct and re-signify sequences of spectacle, and role of counter-spectacle and oppositional places of violence, destruction, and misery as desire and pleasure for practices in the making of urban space (for an overview, see Gotham the tourist. The burgeoning work on dark tourism and related forms and Krier, 2008). Woodworth (2015) proposes that researchers consider recognizes that the meaning of key signifiers connected to tourism – the role of opposition practices and the ways in which urban spaces can

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