China and Deep-Rooted Vision: Cultural Grammar in Contest in Tourism, Today

Abstract

In this review article, Hou provides critique of China, today, as an imaginal realm performed and articulated through tourism. In noting the inevitability that the projections of tourism about places and nations are infused with historically informed understandings forged not just decades ago but centuries past, she calls for much greater awareness in Tourism Studies/Tourism Management (and beyond) of the cultural grammar of tourism, and thereby not only of what conceivably gets represented through tourism, but also of what conceivably gets misrepresented. In this respect, Hou works from the premise that a relatively large intellectual gap has existed between (for instance) established Chinese notions of Chineseness, and “European” notions of Chineseness. In that light, she examines what can be learned for Tourism Studies/Tourism Management from scrutiny of what a recent Western observer (the Hungarian academic, Nyíri) says was and is happening about the signification of Chineseness today, and what certain lead experts on the politics of nationalism say was and is happening in terms of the projection of Chineseness. Overall, Hou queries whether there are many who work on such matters of cultural grammar in research or operational practice in tourism who have been sufficiently trained in transdisciplinary understanding to be able to comment critically on the constitutive exteriority of China (or of any still-developing/fast-developing nation) in and through tourism. Hou argues that while the inscriptive and performative authority of tourism is manifestly immense, the critical capacity of Tourism Studies/Tourism Management scholars to scrutinize the selective and productive rhetoric of “place”/“space”/“nation” construction is not. (Abstract by the Reviews Editor)