NOT TOURISM WORLDMAKING: A CRITICAL DIALOGUE WITH HOLLINSHEAD & VELLAH ON POST-COVID-19 SENSIBLE ENTANGLEMENTS

Abstract

Hollinshead proclaimed tourism worldmaking as the creative/imaginative and often false/faux processes that management agencies and mediating bodies use to favour particular representations of places and people. Whilst this remains valid at an organisational level, the COVID-19 pandemic has radically (and maybe also hopefully) changed the very regimes of sensory apprehension on which tourism is based, thus also suggesting that we rethink the worldmaking aspects of its post-industrial creation (rather than production and consumption chains). Considering some recent discussions on what may happen to tourism after the end of the pandemic I claim that:1. we should begin by reassessing the realm of the sensible,2. talk more about “travel worldmaking”, and3. reconsider the centrality of the traveller’s emotional work during world travels.The thesis develops at the intersection of the “must” (urgency to sustain), the “ought” (call to respect) and the “desire” (drive to enjoy). It calls for a reassessment of worldmaking agency as a structured form of action, which gestures towards a durable change in sensible entanglements between humans and the world. I engage in a critical collegial dialogue with Hollinshead and Vellah’s (2020) thesis that tourism as a postcolonial or post-industrial moment per se contributes to post-identity. Instead, I argue that after the COVID-19 event (among other viral worldmaking events threatening to eliminate humanity), world travellers resort to what is deemed accessible through their sensory capabilities within structured conditions. Tourism is thus also reimagined at a sensible level separately from the organisational/institutional processes which Hollinshead & Vellah place centre stage in their thesis.