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Released on the 500-year anniversary of the publication of Sir Thomas More's Utopia, this volume seeks to adapt and apply More's fecund imagination to the contemporary leisure landscape. The contributors to this volume theorize and analyze a variety of 'tourist utopias' - a nascent socio-spatial form crucial to a post-industrial global economy. From Disney World to Dubai, 'Middle Earth' to Marina Bay, Macau to Abu Dhabi, these sites share common characteristics that include their respective status as 'spaces of exception' entrepreneurial governance regimes that rely on cooperation among state and non-state actors; transient, multinational populations; immaterial and affective forms of labor and consumption; superlative and iconic architecture; and economies devoted to such leisure activities as shopping, gambling, and spectacle. These locales are not only popular destinations for migrant workers and mobile tourists from around the globe, but also serve as cultural laboratories for testing new formats and protocols of an emergent post-Fordist form-of-life.
Sommario
Prolegomenon 1. Mapping Tourist Utopias (Tim Simpson) 2. The Zone is on Vacation (Keller Easterling) Enclaves 3. Instant Cities in the Jungle: Fantasies of Modernity for Whom? (Pal Nyiri) 4. After Utopia: Macau as a Tourist Utopia (Tim Simpson) 5. Choreographing Singapore's Utopia by the Bay (Daniel P. S. Goh) 6. Cultural Utopia: Abu Dhabi's Island of Happiness and the Development of a Cultural Enclave (Yasser Elshewtawy) Imaginaries 7. Disney's Utopian Techo-Futures: Tomorrow's World that We Should Build Today (Angela Ndalianis) 8. Tourism and a Virtual Bulgaria (Benjamin Kidder Hodges) 9. Sublimity, Sovereignty, and Sophistry: The Trouble in Middle Earth (Margaret Werry) Archipelagos 10. From Dubai to Mount Athos: Carving Islands of Fear and Hope (Veronica della Dora) Macau Utopics: A Visual Essay (Adam Lampton).
Info autore
Tim Simpson is Associate Professor of Communication, and Associate Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Macau, where he has worked since 2001. He is the co-author (with photographer Roger Palmer) of the volume
Macao Macau (Black Dog Publishing).
