Abstract
Emergent studies of “prison tourism” are beginning to provide critical insight into a variety of problems formerly un- or under-developed in the scholarly paradigm of “dark tourism.” “Dark tourism” denotes the trend of packaging and consuming sites of, and associated with, death or suffering as tourist experiences (Strange and Kempa 2003: 387; Sharpley 2009: 10; Miles 2002: 1175). Dark tourist destinations are broad in scope and include sites of natural and human-made disasters alike (Sharpley and Stone 2009; Lennon and Foley 2010).1 The breadth of the dark tourism paradigm has been subject to a number of objections, criticisms, and revisions. In accounting for the diverse, but usually consumer-driven, behaviors of tourists, scholars have placed dark tourism on a spectrum from “darkest” to “lightest” (Dalton 2015: 5; Sharpley and Stone 2009; Miles 2002: 1175). William F.S. Miles (2002: 1175) further suggests a distinction between “dark” and “darker” tourism in distinguishing “between sites associated with death, disaster, and depravity and sites of death, disaster and depravity.”
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
In differentiating “dark” from “darker” tourism, Miles (2002: 1176) introduces the further category of “darkest” tourism. If “dark tourism” “encompasses visits to commemorative sites associated with death and holocaust, and darker tourism constitutes travel to actual sites of barbarism and genocide, darkest tourism would transcend both the spatial differences that distinguish dark from darker type and the time gap that separates both dark and darker from the remembered tragedy” (Miles 2002: 1176). For Miles (2002: 1176), “darkest tourism” would involve “real time” virtual tours of active sites of death and depravity. For an example of the darkest tourism, see Lutz Kaelber (2007: 24), who draws on the “darkest tourism” framework in examining virtual tours of actual and recreated gas chambers of Auschwitz.
- 3.
This term comes from the work of Michel Foucault, who conceives a complex entanglement of knowledge and power. For Foucault, power is ultimately a constructive rather than a prohibiting force—power “traverses and produces things, it produces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression” (Foucault 2002: 60).
- 4.
Dr. Piotr M.A. Cywiński, the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial, exemplifies this point in describing Auschwitz as “the symbol of evil for the entire world, which is manifested by an over threefold increase in attendance, interest of the media, Internet statistics as well as over half a billion people throughout the planet who watched the 70th anniversary of the liberation of KL Auschwitz live on television” (Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum 2015a).
- 5.
Lennon and Foley (2010: 3) conceive pilgrimage as one of the earliest forms of tourism. Pilgrimage is often associated with violent and untimely deaths which take on religious or ideological significance to a certain groups of people (Lennon and Foley 2010: 3). In the context of Auschwitz, pilgrimage is amongst the various motivations that draw visitors to the camp.
- 6.
During its period of operation, Auschwitz formed a complex archipelago, consisting of three main camps—Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, and Auschwitz III-Monowitz—and a network of almost fifty sub-camps (Giaccaria and Minca 2011: 4).
- 7.
Zyklon B is the deadly chemical used to murder countless people in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and other extermination camps.
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Pedersen, C. (2017). Screening Tourist Encounters: Penal Spectatorship and the Visual Cultures of Auschwitz. In: Wilson, J., Hodgkinson, S., Piché, J., Walby, K. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Tourism. Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56135-0_7
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