Time for Fluid Acumen: A Call for Improved Tourism Studies Dialogue With the Decolonizing World

Abstract

This article draws from the work of recent commentators in Tourism Studies like Coles, Hall, and Duval (calling for much more prevalent adisciplinary/extradisciplinary cognition in Tourism Studies), like Franklin (demanding much more commonplace critique of the ways in which different societies are ordered), and like Hollinshead (bemoaning the general absence of open-to-the-future research agendas in and across the field). The article aims to consolidate the advances signposted by such new wave/ new sense social theorists by drawing up a substantial conceptual glossary to help Tourism Studies researchers (and investigators in related fields) towards improved identification about the cosmologies of "other," "distant," or "underrecognized" populations, and towards more pertinent research agendas into the strategies of power that represent the cultural warrants and the aspirations of "different" peoples. In seeking in particular to develop an informed and contextualized lexicon on matters of decolonization vis-à-vis the political and communicative reach of tourism, the glossary focuses upon terms and concepts that pertain to the fantasmatics of populations (i.e., to the cherished emic aspirations of being and becoming that propel particular "distant"/"marginalized"/"postcolonial" societies). Hopefully, the provision of the glossary shown here can help improve the conceptual manner by which the consequential power/agency of tourism is understood today in terms of its authority to inscribe and project decolonizing societies and so-called postcolonial scenarios. The glossary being introduced within the article is itself drawn from a larger work in progress lexicon consisting of some 500 words (plus), which the authors are defining in long-haul fashion to variously describe the old sense/the wrong sense/the new sense/the open sense fantasmatics of populations. The overall more substantial glossary includes terms and concepts: on cosmology (deep listening, the indigenous renaissance, new nativism, quilted discourse, spiral discourse); on being and belonging (borderland pedagogy, conscientization, healing, fluid lives, complex personhood); on othering and otherness (governable bodies, hierarchies of knowledge, epistemic closure, linguicide, psychic violence); on imperialist/colonialist/neocolonialist understanding (rhetorical imperialism, master narratives, canonicity, cognitive imperialism, ascriptive identities); on fantasmatics [restorative processes, survivancy, the possibility of (XYZ), capacity, transgressive validities]; on new sense understandings (the dialectics of negotiation, the denaturalization of truth, interculturality, dethinking, the power of possibility).