ABOUT THIS BOOK

Staging Visitation frames tourism and travel as complex social performances that shape identities, communities, and global imaginaries. This volume proposes “visitation” as a framework that emphasizes the participatory and relational dimensions of travel. While tourism is often pejoratively framed as a commodified or exploitative leisure activity for those with means, its reality is far more nuanced. Tourism stages heritage, provokes encounters across cultural divides, and prompts both visitors and hosts to negotiate values and identities—all while sustaining economies (and the power relations they produce) at global and local scales.

From museums and theme parks to festivals and influencer culture, the essays in this volume trace how transitory encounters—embodied, affective, and historically layered—build travel destinations into theatricalized places. These essays bring theatre and performance studies into conversation with cultural geography, sociology, anthropology, and media studies to demonstrate how tourism functions as both a stage and a repertoire for modern life.

Staging Visitation argues that travel is not only about movement across space, but also about the performance of culture itself—its preservation, reinvention, and transformation.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Bryan Schmidt is Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor of Theatre at the College of William & Mary.
Weston Twardowski is Associate Director of the Center for Environmental Studies and the Rice Sustainability Institute’s EcoStudio at Rice University.

REVIEWS

“Staging Visitation has an outstanding diversity of topics that is likely to attract a wide range of readers, making it an excellent addition to the emerging field of tourism and performance. Readers who are new to this subtopic or want to do a “Grand Tour” of the area would come away from this book familiar with a breadth of approaches and models. This is the perfect volume for scholars just beginning to develop an interest in tourism and performance.”— Jennifer Kokai, University of South Florida

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Volume Introduction: Staging Visitation

Section 1
Staging Identity: Self-Making through Visitation

Section Introduction

By Means of Visitation: Tourism and Identity on Spain’s Sephardic Way

Manufacturing “The

Effect”: Costa Rica’s Envision Festival, Pure Life, and the Contradictions of Conscious Tourism

The Black Flowers of the Walled City: Tourism and the Embodiment of

National Heritage in Cartagena

Section 2

Staged Visits: Making Places Perform

Section Introduction

“You’ve Got a Great Past Ahead of You”: Performance and American History at Silver Dollar City Theme Park

The World on Display from the Comfort of Home: Covid Olympics and Staging National Identity

Brick Lane and Shakespeare’s Globe: Street As Performance

Section 3

Virtual Stages: Immersive Imagination

Section Introduction

“This Place is the Bomb”: Pacific Theaters of Virtual Militourism from Pearl Harbor to Call of Duty

One-Month Living Broadcast: Vlog Performances and Contested Visitation in Jeju

Sightseeing Tours and Gendered Performances in Georgian London’s Paradisial Gardens

Section 4

All the World’s a Stage: Planetary Visitations

Section Introduction

H(a)unting Africa: A Dazzle of Competing Narratives

Dinosaur Encounters: Settler Colonialism and Planetary Time in South Dakota’s Black Hills

Afronauts in the Desert: Planetary Portals and Visitation in Afrofuturist Performance