Overview
- Bridges scholarship of western literature and culture with Tourism Studies, Sociology, and Ethnography and Anthropology
- Provides the first focused exploration of dark tourism in the American West
- Valuable for those interested in the American West as a geographic and imagined space
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Table of contents (10 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Natural/Ecological Disasters
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Front Matter
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Unmediated Sites
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This edited collection expands scholarly and popular conversations about dark tourism in the American West. The phenomenon of dark tourism—traveling to sites of death, suffering, and disaster for entertainment or educational purposes—has been described and, on occasion, criticized for transforming misfortune and catastrophe into commodity. The impulse, however, continues, particularly in the American West: a liminal and contested space that resonates with stories of tragedy, violent conflict, and disaster. Contributions here specifically examine the mediation and shaping of these spaces into touristic destinations. The essays examine Western sites of massacre and battle (such as Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site and the “Waco Siege”), sites of imprisonment (such as Japanese-American internment camps and Alcatraz Island), areas devastated by ecological disaster (such as Martin’s Cove and the Salton Sea), and unmediated sites (those sites left to the touristic imagination, with no interpretation of what occurred there, such as the Bennet-Arcane camp).
Editors and Affiliations
About the editor
Jennifer Dawes is Chair of the Department of English, Humanities, and Philosophy at Midwestern State University, USA. Her previous scholarly work includes essays on cannibalism in film and authenticity in western literature as well as the book Across the Plains: Sarah Royce’s Western Narrative.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Dark Tourism in the American West
Editors: Jennifer Dawes
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21190-5
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-21189-9Published: 24 August 2019
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-21192-9Published: 25 August 2020
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-21190-5Published: 12 August 2019
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XI, 214
Number of Illustrations: 4 b/w illustrations, 13 illustrations in colour
Topics: Sociology of Sport and Leisure, Cultural Studies, Sociology of Culture, Ethnography, Media Sociology