From the SelectedWorks of Dr Philip Stone

2018

The History of Dark TourismPhilip R. Stone

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Journal of Tourism History

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The history of dark tourism

Rudi Hartmann, John Lennon, Daniel P. Reynolds, Alan Rice, Adam T.Rosenbaum & Philip R. Stone

To cite this article: Rudi Hartmann, John Lennon, Daniel P. Reynolds, Alan Rice, Adam T.Rosenbaum & Philip R. Stone (2018): The history of dark tourism, Journal of Tourism History, DOI:10.1080/1755182X.2018.1545394

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DISCUSSION

The history of dark tourismRudi Hartmanna, John Lennonb, Daniel P. Reynoldsc, Alan Riced, Adam T. Rosenbaume

and Philip R. Stonef

aDepartment of Geography and Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado Denver, Denver, CO, USA;bMoffat Centre for Travel and Tourism Business Development, Glasgow Caledonian University, Glasgow, UK;cGerman Department, Grinnell College, Grinnell, IA, USA; dSchool of Humanities and Social Sciences,University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK; eDepartment of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Colorado MesaUniversity, Grand Junction, CO, USA; fInstitute for Dark Tourism Research, Lancashire School of Business andEnterprise, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK

ABSTRACTIt may be categorically unpleasant to visit cemeteries, crash sites,and death camps, but tourists queue up to see such places.Scholars have been attempting to explain this fascination with themacabre and morbid since the mid-1990s. Early analyses of darktourism highlighted the modern and postmodern motivationsunderlying this novel form of travel. As a result, much of thesubsequent work on this phenomenon has concentrated oncontemporary visits to modern sites such as Auschwitz orChernobyl. Yet, it is undeniable that ancient trips to the RomanColosseum and medieval pilgrimages to locations of martyrdomhad dark undertones, as many have noted. This round tablediscussion draws together five scholars to consider how a varietyof forces have fuelled dark tourism in the past.

KEYWORDSDark tourism; thanatourism;death; heritage; collectivememory

Adam T. Rosenbaum: editor’s introduction

Dark tourism is a popular subject these days. It has inspired the founding of the Institutefor Dark Tourism Research at the University of Central Lancashire, the launch of the aca-demic journal, Current Issues in Dark Tourism Research, and the recent publication of thePalgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies, featuring thirty essays exploring the variousfacets of this phenomenon.1 But dark tourism is also a popular subject outside of academiccircles. In late July 2018, a show called Dark Tourist debuted on Netflix. This documentaryseries follows the adventures of New Zealand journalist David Ferrier as he seeks out ‘themad, the macabre, and morbid’ in locations across the globe. In the first episode, Ferrierdefines ‘dark tourism’ as ‘a global phenomenon where people avoid the ordinary andinstead head for holidays in warzones, disaster sites, and other offbeat destinations’.2

Many of the destinations featured in the series are associated with death or destruction,like the location of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, Texas, but other destinations

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

CONTACT Adam T. Rosenbaum arosenba@coloradomesa.edu1Philip R. Stone, Rudi Hartmann, A.V. Seaton, Richard Sharpley, and Leanne White, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of DarkTourism Studies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

2Dark Tourist, season 1, episode 1, ‘Latin America’, presented by David Ferrier, released July 20, 2018, on Netflix, onlinestreaming.

JOURNAL OF TOURISM HISTORYhttps://doi.org/10.1080/1755182X.2018.1545394

are just downright weird, like the Huis Ten Bosch theme park in southern Japan, whichfeatures a hotel staffed entirely by robots.

However we define it, dark tourism clearly demolishes the simplistic definition oftourism as ‘travelling for pleasure’.3 It is categorically unpleasant to visit cemeteries,crash sites, and death camps, and yet people queue up to see such places. Scholars havebeen attempting to explain this fascination with the macabre and morbid since themid-1990s. Chris Rojek started the conversation in 1993 by introducing the idea of‘black spots’, defined as ‘the commercial developments of grave sites and sites in whichcelebrities or large numbers of people have met with sudden and violent death’. Accordingto Rojek, this obsession is ‘widely shared’ and associated with ‘the landscape of postmo-dernism’.4 Three years later, Anthony Seaton coined the term ‘thanatourism’ to describe‘travel to a location wholly, or partially, motivated by the desire for actual or symbolicencounters with death’. According to Seaton, the contemplation of death is common inall cultures, but it has become more pronounced now that modern society has successfullyconcealed death and rendered it taboo.5 In another article in the very same journal issue,John Lennon and Malcolm Foley introduced the now fashionable phrase, ‘dark tourism’.6

In a subsequent monograph, they described dark tourism as ‘an intimation of post-mod-ernity’, a practice that reveals larger anxieties about industrial, scientific, and political pro-gress.7 In other words, visiting certain sights was a way to visualise the dangerousconsequences of new technologies and ideologies.

Early analyses of dark tourism highlighted the modern and postmodern motivationsunderlying this novel form of travel. As a result, much of the subsequent work on thisphenomenon has concentrated on contemporary visits to modern sites like Auschwitzor Chernobyl. Yet, it is undeniable that ancient excursions to the Roman Colosseumand medieval pilgrimages to locations of martyrdom had dark undertones, as manyhave noted.8 Recognising that the history of dark tourism has historical roots, weshould also acknowledge that it is not a homogeneous phenomenon, and different siteshave meant different things to visitors and travel promoters over time.

The Journal of Tourism History began this round table discussion with a simple ques-tion: how have a variety of forces fuelled dark tourism in the past? Representing a varietyof scholarly perspectives, our four discussants include John Lennon, co-author of theseminal book, Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Tourism; Alan Rice, anexpert in the field of the ‘Black Atlantic’; Daniel P. Reynolds, author of the recently-pub-lished Postcards from Auschwitz: Holocaust Tourism and the Meaning of Remembrance;and Rudi Hartmann, a geographer interested in heritage tourism, ecotourism, and

3In the early nineteenth century, the Oxford English Dictionary first defined tourism, stressing the still novel concept of ‘tra-velling for pleasure’. Hartmut Berghoff and Barbara Korte, ‘Britain and the Making of Modern Tourism: An InterdisciplinaryApproach’, in The Making of Modern Tourism: The Cultural History of the British Experience, 1600–2000, ed. HartmutBerghoff, Barbara Korte, Ralf Schneider, and Christopher Harvie (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 2, endnote 4.

4Chris Rojek, Ways of Escape: Modern Transformations in Leisure and Travel (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993), 136, 138.5A.V. Seaton, ‘Guided by the Dark: From Thanatopsis to Thanatourism’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 2, no. 4(1996): 240, 243.

6Malcolm Foley and John Lennon, ‘JFK and Dark Tourism: A Fascination with Assassination’, International Journal of HeritageStudies 2, no. 4 (1996): 198–211.

7John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster (New York: Continuum, 2000), 11.8Philip R. Stone, ‘A Dark Tourism Spectrum: Towards a Typology of Death and Macabre Related Tourist Sites, Attractions andExhibitions’, Tourism: An Interdisciplinary International Journal 54, no. 2 (2006): 147; Seaton, ‘Guided by the Dark’, 236;Lennon and Foley, Dark Tourism, 4.

2 R. HARTMANN ET AL.

sustainable tourism planning. Philip R. Stone, the Executive Director of the Institute forDark Tourism Research and the editor of Current Issues in Dark Tourism Research,serves as our commentator. Each of the discussants responded to the initial promptwith opening remarks. Our commentator then offered his thoughts and raised someadditional questions. This sparked a second round of replies, followed by the commenta-tor’s conclusion. The conversation went in some unexpected but fascinating directions,touching upon issues like commercialisation, dissonant heritages, and collectivememory, while also considering the future of dark tourism. The contributors have leftus with plenty to think about, as well as some new research angles to consider.

Opening remarks

John Lennon: Dark tourism has become established as a specialist focus for tourismresearch and has been used to discuss the wider fascination we appear to have with ourown mortality and the fate of others.9 However, death, suffering, visitation, and tourismhave been interrelated for many centuries as previously intimated.10 From ancientRome and gladiatorial combat to attendance at medieval public executions, death hasheld a steadfast and enduring appeal. Sites associated with such phenomena may thenin turn become tourist attractions focused on this dark element of their past or part ofwider heritage interpretive theme(s).

However, in addition to the ancient, dark tourism has also exhibited elements (forces) ofthe modern and post-modern. Modernity is usually associated with rationalism and provesuseful in the educative and learning justification often offered in relation to critiques of thecommercial development of, and visitation to, dark sites. The defence is constructed arounda logic of visitation as an elemental ‘learning’ experience. This rationalisation, logically, alsolinks to the importance of such sites as evidence of atrocity and evil. Clearly, the importanceof such sites as historical record and the complex arguments in relation to imagery,interpretation, and motivations to view are further heightened by the demands and behav-iour of visitors and tourists. Finally, it is in the area of post-modernity that the criticalinfluence of media coverage becomes evident. The wide range of social, digital, satellite,and terrestrial telecommunications channels has undoubtedly heightened awareness ofacts of atrocity and evil. This is analogous to the influence of heightened media coverageof terrorist acts on tourism destinations and subsequent patterns of travel. The severity ofsuch acts, in terms of loss of life, are now less significant if considered chronologicallyagainst reportage and media coverage over the last decade. Visibility and media coverage,which has grown exponentially, has had some of the most significant recent impacts on con-sumer awareness and travel behaviour following terrorist atrocities. This influence by themedia is comparable to the coverage received by a number of dark sites.

The emotional attraction of dark sites is neither new nor culturally straightforward.They offer more than sites of reflection, learning, and historical record yet have

9Richard Sharpley and Philip R. Stone, eds., The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism (London:Routledge, 2009); J.E. Tunbridge and G.J. Ashworth, Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource inConflict (Chichester, UK: John Wiley 1995).

10Lennon and Foley, Dark Tourism; A.V. Seaton and John J. Lennon, ‘New Horizons in Tourism: Strange Experiences andStranger Practices’, in Moral Panics, Ulterior Motives and Ulterior Desires: Thanatourism in the 21st century, ed. T.V.Singh (Wallingford, UK: CABI Publishing 2004), 63–82.

JOURNAL OF TOURISM HISTORY 3

simultaneously become part of the visitor experience. However, equally important inunderstanding the forces and influences are the lessons from non-commemoration andthe loss of dark sites. This is linked to ideology, ownership of historical narratives, histor-iography, and, at an operational level, aspects such as conservation skills and locally trans-lated economic priorities. Such a range of causational factors confirms that objects andsites do not exist in isolation and are imbued with meaning. The interpretation ofobjects, buildings, and locations allows us to attempt to understand and comprehendelements of our history which may at first glance be irreconcilable with our currentexistence.

The development and interpretation of all dark heritage (as for heritage more generally)is the result of complex interactions and pressures between stakeholders and interestgroups. Heritage is itself a contested terrain and the pursuit of historical ‘accuracy’ isinvariably compromised by competing ideologies, interpretation, funding, and politicisa-tion and so on. Indeed, defining heritage, let alone agreeing on verifiable truths and nar-ratives will invariably remain elusive.

The troubled history of the plantation houses of Charleston, South Carolina, USA arecited as examples of historically important architectural structures which are the subject ofconservation legislation and protection.11 Yet these graceful structures are the product ofthe excesses of slavery and the appalling exploitation of human labour. The continuedpreservation and maintenance of such buildings has been the subject of some debate.An alternative is to allow them to decay or obliterate them as a flawed commemoration.This parallels debates on the maintenance of concentration camps and architectural evi-dence of the Nazi past in Germany.12 The contemporary German landscape is heavilypopulated with built heritage associated with the Nazi past, creating spiralling conserva-tion and development costs. Obliteration and demolition (even of lesser sites and struc-tures) has been challenged as a method of disguising an unacceptable past history. Inthe case of the Nazi regime and the development of concentration camps this indeedwas the intention. These structures were originally developed as ‘temporary’ campswhich on completion of the Final Solution (the annihilation of Jews and others) wouldin turn be annihilated like the victims they had incarcerated.13 If such dark heritage isnot commemorated it may be seen, in whole or part, as some form of complicit suppres-sion of history. In this respect, the limited commemoration of the Roma and Sinti geno-cide is a pertinent example that belies long-term and widespread racial and ethnicprejudice that has been simply reaffirmed by the limited interpretation in former sitesof concentration camps.14 Such partial or selective narratives have been defined as theprocess of creating multiple constructions of the past15 whereby history is never an

11Graham M.S. Dann and A.V. Seaton, eds. Slavery, Contested Heritage and Thanatourism (Binghampton, NY: HaworthHospitality Press 2001).

12Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Simon & Schuster 1988); Colin Philpott,Relics of the Reich: The Buildings the Nazis Left Behind (York, UK: Trinners, 2016).

13James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meanings (New Haven and London: Yale UniversityPress, 1993).

14John J. Lennon and Hugh Smith, ‘A Tale of Two Camps: Contrasting Approaches to Interpretation and Commemoration inthe Sites at Terezin and Lety, Czech Republic’, Tourism Recreation Research 29, no. 1 (2004): 15–25.

15A. Craig Wight and John J. Lennon, ‘Selective Interpretation and Eclectic Human Heritage in Lithuania’, Tourism Manage-ment 28, no. 2 (2007): 519–29.

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objective recall of the past, but is rather a selective interpretation, based on the way inwhich we view ourselves in the present.

Dark tourism sites present significant evidence of this selective interpretation and illus-trate issues of cultural consumption and heritage commodification. This in turn gives riseto societal implications including the exclusion of minority groups and problems with theethics of ‘selling’ the past.16 The ‘dark’ heritage landscape continues to exist in a digital ageof historical abbreviation and a society where ‘truth’ has become a commodity. These darksites will continue to be dominated by moral complexities surrounding their commemora-tion/non-commemoration, education, and interpretation. It is only through addressingethical dichotomies and dealing with selectivity in much of the dominant historical nar-rative, that dark tourism sites can maintain their relevance and centrality to our sharedpast. Such sites offer a longitudinal perspective on what differentiates us as a species,just as they can offer primacy of object(s) and ‘authentic’ experience(s) in contrast to con-temporary simulated and virtual alternatives.

Alan Rice: In the summer of 1796 the retired headmaster of the Lancaster Royal GrammarSchool, James Watson, was moved to make a daily pilgrimage to Sunderland Point, a spitof land on the Lune Estuary, the entrance to the port of Lancaster. His mission was to raisemoney from leisure visitors to the popular destination for the creation of a permanentmarker on the grave of a black boy buried there around sixty years before. The circum-stances of Sambo’s arrival in Sunderland and his swift death there were not recorded inany written record heretofore. His death was not registered at any church at the time,and the only way his burial ground was remembered was through the oral narratives oflocal residents, who decided that because of his non-Christian status he had to beburied in unconsecrated ground. The local narrative was that of the white residents ofthe Point, and is therefore unreliable and possibly partisan. It explains how the Africanboy was left in the care of the innkeeper whilst his master took supplies into the city,how he took ill, died, and abandoned by his master, was buried by the islanders.Watson’s pilgrimage and fundraising was a response to two major motivations: first, arising national tide of abolition that had reached its zenith in the late 1780s and early1790s and that had even penetrated the slaving port of Lancaster (4th largest in theUnited Kingdom), and second, his own familial guilt as both his brothers had ownedshares in slaving voyages. Watson, by his very presence on the Point, would have encour-aged casual visitors taking the sea air to venture to the gravesite down a narrow footpathon the seaward side of the spit making the location an exemplary historical site of darktourism, long before the era of mass tourism. The forces that fuelled this transformationof a pauper grave to a site of pilgrimage for those engaged in rethinking received ideasabout slavery and race are set loose by the liberating notion of abolition which would cul-minate in the abolition of the slave trade in Britain and its territories in 1807.

Eventually, Watson was to raise enough money over the summer of 1796 to pay for astone slab to be placed over the grave and for a brass plaque to be affixed. Watson, in whatcould be seen as an act of hubris, had inscribed on the plaque the final three verses of hishyperbolically sentimental poem about Sambo and the gravesite, which, to my knowledge,

16Dino Domic, ‘Heritage Consumption, Identity, Formation and Interpretation of the Past within Post War Croatia’, (Wolver-hampton Business School Management Research Centre, Working Paper Series 2000).

JOURNAL OF TOURISM HISTORY 5

was never published in print in his lifetime. This act of memorialisation changes the sitebeyond recognition – from a simple unmarked grave in the rabbit warren at the bottom ofa farmer’s field which would probably have disappeared from all but the most arcaneknowledge, to a sophisticated burial plot. The transformed site enables Watson’s gener-ation to frame ideological explanations which have more to do with their own emotionalneeds than with attempting to understand the economic and political forces that broughtthe young black man to Lancashire and led to his death: the history of the exploitation ofAfrican labour in the Americas to make profits in Europe. The irony here is that had hebeen buried unmarked in the Church at Overton (like the Christian residents of the Point)his story would almost certainly been long forgotten. With the gravesite now sentimentallymemorialised by Watson, it is not forgotten and pilgrimages continue until the present.These visits led to the gravesite’s development so that by the 1990s it was festoonedwith mementoes, especially stones with messages for Sambo sometimes painted by school-children in school projects which have continued to 2018. More recently young girlsespecially have left hair bobbles on the modern cross as mementoes, taking intimateobjects associated with their engaged bodies to show their empathy with the African’sstory of loss. The modern cross itself is ironically placed here as this unconsecratedspot seems to me to be colonised by a contemporary Christian sensibility when historicallythe church had rejected the African.

In my 2003 monograph, Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic, I reflected on the para-doxes at work here and how the African is subsumed into Anglo-European narratives thatultimately and potentially undermine any radical work that could be done by the act ofmemorialising his presence. It is such an important site because there are so few placeswhere we can memorialise the important contributions made by enslaved Africans tothe wealth of Britain. I discuss how:

Sambo’s grave is atypical, being a physical memory of black British historical presence in anenvironment where the memories of such bodies are typically elided. His grave can onlyperform as a radical narrative of the black Atlantic by the force of our memorialising activity.By performing his memorialisation, however, we disavow the silence his grave could be saidto more properly bear witness to - a fitting and mute commentary on the sacrifice of bodies tothe greed of the slave traders. A mute voice speaks, but only as we ventriloquise it and surelythat makes the memorialisation successful mainly for ourselves.17

In commemorating sites of African Atlantic presence it behoves us to be very careful not tobe self-indulgent and not to be complicit in acts of appropriation that resemble the colo-nisation or sentimentalisation of the past. Watson’s 1796 intervention saved this uniquesite for posterity; however, the framing of it through antediluvian Christian sentimentalitymeans that as contemporary visitors to the site we must beware this clarion call andattempt a more complex encounter that attempts to bear witness to Sambo’s deathrather than his subsequent framing. As Paul Ricoeur reminds us: ‘Extracting the exemp-lary value from traumatic memories, it is justice that turns memory into a project, and it isthis same project of justice that gives the form of the future and the imperative to the dutyof memory’.18 In leading contemporary slave site tours to Sunderland Point, I am inspired

17Alan Rice, Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic (London: Continuum, 2003), 217.18Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006),88.

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by Ricoeur’s vision of the continued search for justice which such traumatic sites canengender. In this vision the slave site tour is not a wallowing in pain and trauma, but apedagogic praxis that enables action for change in the contemporary moment. If it doesnot at least aspire to this then what is its point, but a pleasure principle for the entitledand privileged who get a vicarious thrill from the horrors of the past.

Daniel P. Reynolds: Dark tourism, the apparently modern practice of visiting notorioussites of death and disaster, has an ancient pedigree. Pilgrims have visited Jerusalem forcenturies to see the place where Jesus of Nazareth was crucified. The bones arranged inthe catacombs of Rome are no less macabre than those of the Rwandan genocidevictims on display in the Ntarama Church in Kigali. The Pyramids of Egypt are gianttombs, and the Colosseum of Rome once offered killing as a spectator sport. And yet,these older sites are not typically included among destinations of dark tourism. Doesthe death depicted at a tourist site have to be recent to qualify as ‘dark’?

Dark tourism was defined by Lennon and Foley in 1996 to describe modern mass travelto destinations associated with disaster, murder, and mass death. While they acknowledgethe long history of travel to the places where revered figures died, the majority of theirexamples come from the more recent past for an important reason. As they write,‘global communication technologies are inherent in both the events which are associatedwith a dark tourism product and are present in the representation of the events for visitorsat the site itself’.19 What distinguishes dark tourism as a modern phenomenon is that somecalamities have captured the collective imagination through extensive media coverage, thesame technology that made the violence so lethal in the first place. Recall the JosephGoebbels’ (Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany) propaganda machine, orthe use of radio to demonise Tutsis in Rwanda as ‘cockroaches’.

As currently formulated, dark tourism theory engages in a critique of tourism in the ageof global capitalism, of which modern technologies of communication are an essentialpart. That critique is important, but it tends to see travellers as consumers first, pilgrimslast. It is hard not to be cynical about the very idea of pilgrimage in the present age whenseen from the perspective of global capital, but anthropologists and travel writers knowthat there is more to the experience of tourism than commodification.

In my own research into Holocaust-related tourism, I resist using the term ‘darktourism’ for several reasons. To call the Holocaust ‘dark’ is woefully euphemistic whendescribing the shootings, gassings, starvation, and disease that claimed millions of lives.Further, it minimises the importance of such travel for many of its participants, someof whom are survivors or their descendants. In conflating Holocaust tourism with visitsto the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas or Robben Island near Cape Town, dark tourismtheory overlooks unique factors that shape Holocaust tourism in the present. Theseinclude the end of the Cold War, which made travel to Holocaust sites far more practical,and the awareness that the last living witnesses and survivors of the Nazi genocide arepassing. While I appreciate the attention dark tourism theory pays to modern technology,I am reminded that all technology has been ‘modern’ at one time or another. But since theterm is probably here to stay, a more historically open approach to dark tourism may yield

19Lennon and Foley, Dark Tourism, 16–21.

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useful insights into additional factors alongside technologies of communication that haveworked in tandem to influence travel.

Tourism scholars, including Lennon and Foley, often mention Canterbury Tales asan early portrait of group pilgrimage, a precursor to modern-day travel.20 Depictingtravellers on their way to the place where Thomas à Becket was slain, Chaucer’swork happens also to be the first book produced in English by William Caxton’s print-ing press in 1476. The fact that a century separates Chaucer’s unfinished tale from itsappearance in print also reminds us that other ‘technologies’ of communication – bothoral history and the institution of clerical scribes – have accompanied the phenomenonof travel, for Becket’s shrine remained one of the most important destinations of pil-grimage for centuries.

What made the site of Becket’s murder so meaningful to so many pilgrims? As withtourists today, motivations for medieval pilgrimage travel drew on a complex web offactors such as personal wealth, religious devotion, family connections, business interests,curiosity, and more. By canonising Becket soon after his death, Pope Alexander III made apolitical statement designed to assert Rome’s authority over the Church in England, withpilgrims to the Canterbury Cathedral a potent reminder of the Church’s sway over thePlantagenets.

The case for medieval pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral as dark tourism has impor-tant implications for how we think about death-related tourism today. First, it reinforcesthe notion by anthropologists who have long argued that modern tourism and ancient pil-grimage have more in common than the difference in terms might suggest. NelsonGraburn, Dean MacCannell, Malcolm Crick, and others have contended that modern-day travel fulfils many of the same needs on the part of travellers that religious pilgrimageonce did, offering a way of finding transcendent meaning outside of one’s daily life.21

Second, the politics of pilgrimage to Canterbury remind us of the link between ritualtravel and state authority. Tourists make embodied responses to the political calculationsof competing institutions of authority, upholding or contesting those interests in theirchoice of itinerary.

A modern example comes from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum, cited inevery list of dark tourism destinations. In the immediate postwar years, tourism to Ausch-witz became a way for the Communist government to reinforce the narrative of liberationby the Soviet Union while simultaneously articulating a national narrative of Polishsuffering. Auschwitz became emblematic of the genocide of Europe’s Jews only decadeslater. Even today, Auschwitz tourism confronts these different agendas, with Polish Cath-olicism and national identity continuing to claim a space associated internationally withthe remembrance of Europe’s murdered Jews.22

20For example, see Bill Faulkner, Gianna Moscardo, and Eric Laws, ‘Introduction: Moving Ahead and Looking Back’, inTourism in the 21st Century: Reflections on Experience, ed. Bill Faulkner, Gianna Moscardo, and Eric Laws Faulkner(London and New York: Continuum, 2000), 112. See also Malcolm Crick, ‘Representations of International Tourism inthe Social Sciences: Sun, Sex, Sights, Savings, and Servility’, Annual Review of Anthropology 18 (1989): 335; Lennonand Foley, Dark Tourism, 4.

21Crick, ‘Representations of International Tourism’, 332–5; Nelson Graburn, ‘Tourism: The Sacred Journey’, in Hosts andGuests: The Anthropology of Tourism, ed. Valene Smith (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 21–36;Dean MacCannell, The Tourist. A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 43–8.

22See Jonathan Huener, Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979 (Athens: Ohio University Press,2003).

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My point is not to deny the unique features of death-focused tourism in the present.There is something qualitatively different about tourism in an age when creating and cus-tomising travel experiences has never been easier, and when information, includinggraphic images and videos of disaster, can spread virally across the Internet. However,modern technology is common to all forms of travel, and applies to 3S (sea, sand, sun)tourism as much as travel to sites of death and disaster. It is perhaps by dint of that simi-larity, whereby a trip to Auschwitz becomes structurally identical to a trip to DisneyWorld, that also leads dark tourism research to reach predictable conclusions about thepresumed inauthenticity of present-day travel to sites of death and disaster.23 A more his-torical view may temper that tendency by recalling other factors that motivate all kinds oftourism, including its dark varieties.

Rudi Hartmann: Special thanks for inviting me, a human geographer with interest in heri-tage tourism, to be part of a scholarly discussion about dark tourism in the past. First, forclarification: I agree with Anthony Seaton that the thanatourists’ (or dark tourists’)inherent fascination with death and dying and the desire for actual or symbolic encountershas antecedents that date back many centuries, even to the Christian Medieval timeperiod.24 I also agree with Richard Sharpley and Philip Stone that the avoidance ofdeath in contemporary secular society has resulted in or contributed to the darktourism phenomenon.25 Conversely, I disagree with John Lennon and Malcom Foleythat dark tourism is an expression of the post-modern condition.26 However, I do agreethat these five scholars have been instrumental in launching a new thanatourism/darktourism research tradition within the intellectual framework of UK tourism studies aswell as in the spatial context of research in Southern Scotland/Northern England.27

I believe it is not only important to identify credible and possible expressions of darktourism in the past and the forces that fuelled them, the given initial question, but togive due attention to a further question: in which context did the notion of darktourism and the eventual formation of a new research tradition develop? While the twohistoric questions appear to be different in scope and direction, they both touch uponclosely intertwined themes: our search for ‘dark tourists’ in the recent or distant pastand the continued effort to denote, explain, and define such behaviours in the evolvingand widening ‘dark tourism’ literature.

Geographers have examined the innovation and diffusion of ideas and artefacts, such aspast agricultural practices and present-day consumer goods. In the following, I would liketo apply a geographic analysis to where and in which spatial context the thana- and darktourism research tradition originated and eventually diffused. The above mentioned fivescholars worked and lived in Southern Scotland and Northern England during the1995–2007 period (the terms thanatourism and dark tourism terms were first introduced

23I refer here specifically to Tim Cole’s use of the term ‘Auschwitz-Land’ to refer to the Auschwitz-Birkenau MemorialMuseum in his work, Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler: How History is Bought, Packaged, and Sold(New York: Routledge, 1999), 111.

24A.V. Seaton, ‘Thanatourism and Its Discontents: An Appraisal of a Decade’s Work with Some Future Issues and Directions’,in The SAGE Handbook of Tourism Studies, ed. Tazim Jamal and Mike Robinson (Los Angeles: Sage, 2009), 521–42.

25Sharpley and Stone, The Darker Side of Travel.26Lennon and Foley, Dark Tourism.27Rudi Hartmann, ‘Dark Tourism, Thanatourism and Dissonance in Heritage Tourism Management: New Directions in Con-temporary Tourism Research’, Journal of Heritage Tourism 9, no. 2 (2014): 167–74.

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and publicised in 1996). Seaton, Lennon, and Foley were affiliated with academic insti-tutions in Glasgow (Strathclyde University, Glasgow Caledonian University). Sharpley,a graduate of Sheffield University, Strathclyde University (Glasgow), and Lancaster Uni-versity, taught at several Northern England academic institutions: University of Northum-bria (at Newcastle), University of Lincoln (south of Hull), and since 2007 at University ofCentral Lancashire (Preston). At Preston, he formed jointly with Stone a tourism researchcore group with distinct focus on the new dark tourism orientation. While Sharpleyretained a high recognition in the wider tourism study field, Stone, a former managementconsultant, built a specialised and very effective ‘Dark Tourism Forum’ website. Thus, theresearch centre shifted from ‘Glasgow’ (with the relocation of Seaton to Bedfordshire andthe departure of dark tourism name creator Foley from the research arena) to Prestonwhere the dark tourism research agenda was vastly expanded and eventually a new Insti-tute of Dark Tourism Research opened. An exception to the regional background hypoth-esis is Graham Dann, an early contributor to the field.28 During 1996–2007 he wasaffiliated with the University of Luton (in the northern part of the wider London Metro-politan Area), though he was born and grew up in Edinburgh, Scotland. Sharpley, Stone,and to a lesser degree Dann helped to spread the new dark tourism perspective within theUK by organising conference sections and sessions in the late 2000s29 – before the newconcepts and perspectives in dark tourism ‘went global’.30

If we step back to the earliest formulation of the ideas as well as fast forward to thegrowing number of reviewers of the dark tourism research tradition, two scholars standout: Chris Rojek and Duncan Light. In a 1993 publication, Rojek noted the growing popu-larity of places associated with the death of celebrities and visits to other grave sites whichhe labelled tourism to ‘black spots’.31 On the other end, Light has presented arguably themost comprehensive history of dark tourism research to date.32 Not surprisingly, bothRojek and Light originally worked in Southern Scotland or Northern England (atQueens College, Glasgow, and Staffordshire University, Stoke-on-Trent, as well as atLiverpool and Manchester academic institutions respectively) before moving on toLondon and Bournemouth.

My argument here is that the economic and social environment of Southern Scotlandand Northern England offered new opportunities for work in academe. Both industrialregions went through an extended period of severe de-industrialisation (1950–1990).The local employment situation was considered dire. A panacea for job creation wassought, in form of tertiary sector activities including tourism services. In the early1990s, some of the smaller colleges and poly-tech schools near industrial neighbourhoodsin the North were elevated to full university status. Among others, Queen’s College andGlasgow Polytechnic were merged to create Glasgow Caledonian University and theHarris Art College/Preston Polytech/Lancashire Politech became the University of

28Graham Dann, ‘Children of the Dark’, in Horror and Human Tragedy Revisited: The Management of Sites of Atrocities forTourism, ed. G.J. Ashworth and Rudi Hartmann (New York: Cognizant, 2005), 233–52.

29Sharpley and Stone, The Darker Side of Travel; Sharpley and Stone, eds., Tourist Experience: Contemporary Perspectives(London: Routledge, 2011); Sharpley and Stone, eds., Contemporary Tourist Experience: Concepts and Consequences(London: Routledge, 2012).

30Stone, Hartmann, Seaton, Sharpley, and White, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies.31Rojek, Ways of Escape.32Duncan Light, ‘Progress in Dark Tourism and Thanatourism Research: An Uneasy Relationship with Heritage Tourism’,Tourism Management 61 (August 2017): 275–301.

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Central Lancashire. Pioneers in UK tourism studies such as John Urry (LancasterUniversity) and proponents of the new thana- and dark tourism orientation foundemployment in the North, established their careers, and excelled. This Northern Britishnetwork of active tourism researchers may have helped to formulate and disseminatethe notion of dark tourism within England/UK. Later on, internet communicationinitiated particularly by Stone resulted in a much wider list of interested academiciansand media experts.

If I were an environmental determinist (I am not!) the argumentation could be pushedthat it was (pre-eminently) the climate and light conditions that triggered so much interestin the ‘darkness’ theme farther North. By contrast, little or no interest in the ‘darker’aspects of tourism emerged in ‘sunnier’ parts of England, such as in Brighton or Cam-bridge, by the 1990s/early 2000s. If I favoured the ‘nature versus nurture’ dichotomy (Ido not!), the argument could be made that it was the social environment of the run-down industrial wastelands that (among others) shaped the personal values and develop-ment of social scientists in the North.

Philip R. Stone: comment

Dark tourism as a nomenclature exists in the imagination of scholars who wish to shine acritical light on heritage that hurts. As such, ‘ghosts’ of the significant ‘Other’ dead whohaunt our collective conscience have been increasingly commodified through memorials,museums, and visitor attractions – and, consequently, the dead now occupy touristic land-scapes. In other words, the term ‘dark tourism’ (or thanatourism) has been branded intoan internationally recognised taxonomy to denote travel to sites of or sites associated withdeath and ‘difficult heritage’ within global visitor economies. As contributors to this roundtable discussion have pointed out, dark tourism is a broad, provocative, and contestedconcept; dividing opinion both within academic practice as well as in empirical circles.While dark tourism as a scholarly term may have been imposed upon the tourismsector by academia, as Rudi Hartmann implies, touristic sites of death and disasteracross the world often blur the line between commemoration and commercialisation.Yet, despite its historical foundations in practice, dark tourism as a multi-disciplinaryfield of study attempts to capture contemporary (re)presentations of the noteworthydead. Hence, dark tourism allows us to examine issues of dissonance, politics, and histori-city, as well as furthering our sociological understanding of death, the dead, and collectivememory. In turn, dark tourism permits the dead to become contemporary commodities,and for tragic memories to be retailed in socially-sanctioned tourist environments. Evenso, the semi-compulsive nature of consuming dark tourism ensures we do not encounterthe actual corpse, but instead the heritage industry mediates specific narratives of theknown and unknown dead.

The dominion of dark tourism offers a selective voice and records tragedy across time,space, and context and, subsequently, can provide reflectivity of both place and people.Different cultural, political, and linguistic representations of dark tourism and varyinginterpretive experiences are complex and multifarious and cannot be taken at facevalue. Instead, dark tourism in its many guises offers visual signifiers and multiplicity ofmeanings within touristic landscapes, as global visitor sites function as retrospective wit-nesses to acts of atrocity or tragedy. Contemporary memorialisation is played out at the

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interface of dark tourism, where consumer experiences can catalyse sympathy for thevictims or revulsion at the context. Yet, despite the cultural complexity and moral dilem-mas of dark tourism, we disconnect a (tragic) past from the (fretful) present for our(hopeful) future. We gaze at dark tourism in the knowledge that the victims are alreadydead, though the precise context and history of the victims can never be truly understood.Ultimately, dark tourism and its difficult heritage is about death and the dead, but throughits current production and ephemeral consumption, it perhaps tells us more about life andthe living.

It is here, that the initial question of this round table is posed: how have a variety offorces fuelled dark tourism in the past? Before turning to specific contributor remarks,it is perhaps worth noting the origin and transformations of ‘dark tourism’ in practice.In short, it is traditional travel that has evolved and been shaped by profound shifts inthe history of European culture – that are still evident today. Anthony Seaton arguesthat three key historical epochs have defined dark tourism in its current Western tradition.The first was the pilgrimages of Christianity that developed between the fourth and six-teenth centuries and its unique doctrinal emphasis on fatality. As Seaton provocativelynotes with reference to the cross as the identifying symbol of Christians, ‘Christianitywas the first, and only, world religion to make an instrument of torture and death its cor-porate logo’.33 Indeed, during the Middle Ages, a journey to gaze upon relics of the saintsoffered the only valid excuse for leaving home.34 The second was antiquarianism and itsrelated secular-sacred ideology of national heritage that first emerged in sixteenth-centuryEurope. This period witnessed the recording and subsequent promotion of the significantdeath of cultural figures, politicians, artists, and so on, as well as memorials, epitaphs, andancient burial grounds. The final epoch was the period of Romanticism and its complexnexus of literary, artistic, and philosophical ideas that were founded in Britain, France,and Germany in the last half of the eighteenth century and through the nineteenthcentury, and which added to the propensity for secular, death-related travel that continuestoday.

As we enter the contemporary age of dark tourism, John Lennon in his openingremarks reminds us of his original assertion that dark tourism is an intimation of postmo-dernity.35 However, in this discussion, Lennon clarifies his position that the dark tourismconcept does indeed have evident historical pedigree and, subsequently, reaffirms theancient heritage of the phenomena. Nevertheless, Lennon rightly asserts that darktourism today, rather than being a product of postmodernity, is in fact influenced bythe postmodern condition. In other words, though dark tourism may be ‘an oldconcept in a new world’,36 Lennon notes the contemporary nature of the phenomenon,its ideological and socio-political development, its selective and often contentiousinterpretation, as well as the role of modern technology, media, and imagery in promotingand accessing such visitor sites. Indeed, dark tourism may have emerged from the rem-nants of past death-related travel, but dark tourism today displays hallmarks of a

33Seaton, ‘Thanatourism and Its Discontents’, 527.34Anneli Rufus, Magnificent Corpses: Searching Through Europe for St. Peter’s Head, St. Claire’s Heart, St. Stephen’s Hand, andOther Saints’ Relics (New York: Marlowe & Company, 1999).

35Lennon and Foley, Dark Tourism.36Philip R. Stone, ‘Dark Tourism – an Old Concept in a New World’, TOURISM Magazine by the Tourism Society IV, no. 125(2005), http://works.bepress.com/philip_stone/26/ (accessed April 19, 2018).

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contemporary ‘spectacular death’mentality.37 To that end, Lennon alludes to the fact thatwe are reviving, retrieving, rediscovering, and reinventing death in a heritage tourismprocess in which old and almost forgotten practices and ideals are mixed with newsocial conditions characteristic of individualised, globalised, mediatised, and technologi-cally advanced postmodern society.38 However, Lennon makes an important point interms of historical abbreviation inherent in dark tourism in a semiotic ‘post-truth’ age.It is here that dark tourism exposes particularities of people, place, and culture where vis-iting sites of fatality can reveal ontological anxieties about the past as well as the future.The emergent question, therefore, is how and why difficult heritage as semiotic construc-tions of the past, and experienced through dark tourism, is politically engineered andsocially orchestrated? Is the symbolic representation of the dead inherent in darktourism promoting an ‘engineered remembrance’,39 whereby modern memorialisationis failing to sufficiently remind us of our yesteryear fights, struggles, and tragic follies –and ultimately doomed to repetition? Thus, dark tourism symbolises sites of dissonantheritage, sites of selective silences, sites rendered political and ideological, sites powerfullyintertwined with interpretation and meaning, and sites of the imaginary and the imagined.

Engaging with these concepts of the imaginary and the imagined, Alan Rice offers adark tourism case based on the abhorrent slavery legacy of Great Britain and herempire. On a windswept peninsula in north-west England at Sunderland Point (a placeI am very familiar with), the story of ‘Sambo’ the slave boy is immortalised through hisburial plot and Watson’s poem. Against a backdrop of a melancholic seascape, tidalmarshes, and rural idyll combined, tourists now visit the atmospheric grave and recallthe stain of Britain’s slavery heritage. While the sentimental poem by Watson waswritten against a context of slavery abolition and emotional familial ties, Watson essen-tially venerated ‘Sambo’ and, subsequently, the gravesite has become a nodal point in Brit-ain’s slavery landscape. Early tourism to the site would have probably been very much likeit is today – a rambling journey through a romantic panorama – directed towards theliminal gravesite with echoes of Christian memorialisation. Yet, while the isolated graveresonates a narrative of the ‘Black Atlantic’,40 Sambo lives on in memory, his tomb expos-ing the selective amnesia of Britain’s role in human slavery. Of course, (dark) tourism tothe grave has allowed past traumatic memories and bygone social injustices to be(re)framed, yet the extent of memorialisation ‘success/failure’ is once again evident. If,as Rice suggests, Sambo’s death represents ‘a pedagogic praxis that enables action forchange in the contemporary moment’, then the question is: to what extent doesSambo’s grave as a memorial fostered by the visitor economy expose and translate contin-ued slavery and clandestine human trafficking today? Indeed, does the chronological dis-tance of Sambo’s death mean that our slavery past is safely secured, memorialised in ahistorical afterlife, and therefore the mistakes of our ancestors confined to the dominionof the dead?

37Philip R. Stone, ‘Dark Tourism in an Age of “Spectacular Death”’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies, 189–210.

38Michael Hviid Jacobsen, ‘“Spectacular Death” – Proposing a New Fifth Phase to Philippe Ariès’s Admirable History ofDeath’, Humanities 5, no. 9 (2016): 19.

39A.V. Seaton, ‘Encountering Engineered and Orchestrated Remembrance: A Situational Model of Dark Tourism and itsHistory’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies, 9–31.

40Rice, Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic.

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The issue of chronological distance is raised by Daniel Reynolds in his remarks aboutdark tourism and notions of historic pilgrimages. While Reynolds accepts the influence ofcontemporary technology and media, as outlined by Lennon, he locates broader darktourism within the confines of bygone pilgrimages as well as the postmodern search forauthentic experiences. Of course, debates about tourism and authenticity are wellrehearsed, as is the case for so-called ‘post-tourism’, and these arguments are not repeatedhere. However, Reynolds raises an important point in reminding us of the link betweenritual travel, secular pilgrimages, and state authority. In an age of mobility, ‘pilgrimagelandscapes’41 are evident through social constructions and the process of socialisation –a sequential process by which (dark) tourism attractions are marked as quasi-religiousshrines.42 Consequently, Reynolds highlights the Canterbury Tales as a medieval foun-dation for travel to sites of political murder, ideological domination, and socialmayhem. With an emergent ‘politics of pilgrimage’ framework, Reynolds contrasts amodern example in Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum – a site of genocidethat haunts our contemporary imagination. Yet, while Auschwitz-Birkenau had its museo-logical inauguration in 1947, memorial politics of the site have evolved, particularly duringthe Warsaw Pact years and later with Poland’s admittance to the EU. Today, with theadvent of budget air travel to the region and development of nearby Krakow as a culturaltourism destination, the Holocaust site has become an epitome of ‘dark tourism’ for thescale and nature of atrocities committed there. Yet, despite record numbers of touristsnow visiting Auschwitz, and notwithstanding the political nature of memorialisation –including selective recall or so-called ‘heredity victimhood’ – Reynolds laments that,without historical grounding, ‘a trip to Auschwitz becomes structurally identical to atrip to Disney World’. Once again, the very essence of memorialisation through darktourism is being called into question. However, the issue is not with memorialisationitself but with memory – or at least shared narratives of collective memory. TheHolocaust – a focus for Reynold’s secular pilgrimage – was not only the bureaucraticcalculus of death by a Nazi German state but also involved the demonic passions of thepopulace. Arguably, Holocaust memorials rarely convey this message; and as touristsconsume historical places of pain and shame, ‘we would be utter fools to think it can’thappen again, or that the world will never have any more reason to build memorials’.43

In summary, Lennon, Rice, and Reynolds have offered viewpoints of the forces thathave fuelled the dark tourism phenomena – from early pilgrimage travel, to selective pol-itical and socio-cultural interpretations, to dark tourism sites being agents of historic andcontemporary change. As a result, all three contributors have suggested tourist sites oftragic history are places where public and vernacular (hi)stories and memories intersectand act in dialogue. Much of this dialogue is increasingly being captured and studiedwithin the confines of the dark tourism concept. It is here that Rudi Hartmann offers adifferent if not personal account of how dark tourism as a field of study emerged in the

41Derek H. Alderman, ‘Writing on the Graceland Wall: On the Importance of Authorship in Pilgrimage Landscapes’, TourismRecreation Research 27, no. 2 (2002): 27–33.

42A.V. Seaton, ‘Thanatourism’s Final Frontiers? Visits to Cemeteries, Churchyards and Funerary Sites as Scared and SecularPilgrimage’, Tourism Recreation Research 27, no. 2 (2002): 73–82; Noga Collins-Kreiner, ‘Dark Tourism as/is Pilgrimage’,Current Issues in Tourism 19, no. 12 (2016): 1185–9.

43Jonathan Jones, ‘War Memorials Have Failed – We Have Forgotten the Chaos of Fascism’, The Guardian, December 19,2016, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2016/dec/09/war-memorials-have-failed-peter-eisenman-holocaust (accessed April 18, 2018).

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UK (and was globally exported), and which continues to provide thought-leadership.Hartmann cites one of the forces driving dark tourism as a research tradition was thefact that pioneer scholars of the field all came from Northern England/Southern Scotland.Hartmann goes on to claim that the industrial Badlands of the region provided the socialenvironment in which ‘dark tourism’ emerged and developed as an academic construct. Ofcourse, it is true that most of the pioneer scholars do currently reside and work in (Hart-mann’s bleak) north of England; though others do not and have always worked in (Hart-mann’s sunnier) south of England. [I actually spent my formative years in the BritishMidlands, and spent much of my early career based in London and south-westEngland, and worked across the UK and continental Europe.] Consequently, while Hart-mann is sincere in his analysis, I remain to be convinced that the so-called ‘social environ-ment of the run-down industrial wastelands’ shaped the ‘personal values anddevelopment’ of pioneer dark tourism social scientists of the ‘British North’. Rather, weended up at specific universities by design and choice rather than default and chance;and the vibrancy of our re-energised regions and forward-thinking institutions alloweddark tourism to flourish as a multidisciplinary field.

However, regardless of where the dark tourism concept was founded, it is clear that theprovocative term has bought together global scholars from across the disciplinary field.Moreover, it is clear that discussions in this first round have bought up issues of collectivememory, contested narratives, and the effectiveness of memorialisation within the visitoreconomy. To that end, in the next round, I would like discussants to offer a critical insightas whether dark tourism and inherent memorial messages from a tragic past are gettingthrough; and, if so, what are those historic messages and do they render warnings fromhistory? In short, is memorialisation through dark tourism working?

Responses

Lennon: Whilst I have great respect and interest for the direction and range of darktourism research in the wider field and believe that this direction and growth is healthy,I remain focussed on its vital role in evidence and education. Here tourism hasassumed an important place amongst other subject areas. Recent research on tourismrelated to incarceration, crime, and prison as well as the interpretation of war illustratesthe potential for wider debate and movement into other disciplinary areas.44 Similarly,work in the area of crime and memory reaffirms the importance of the evidential roleof the dark subject matter.45

The current situation in Cambodia is pertinent to this debate. One popular dark touristattraction in this country is Security Office 21, a former Khmer Rouge incarceration site.Whilst not unique in its interpretation of barbarism and genocide, the site known locallyas S-21 is an increasingly crucial part of evidence and an important conduit for education

44Martin Gegner and Bart Ziino, eds., The Heritage of War (London: Routledge, 2011); Joan Beaumont, ‘Contested Transna-tional Heritage: The Demolition of Changi Prison, Singapore’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 15, no. 4 (June2009): 294–316; Carolyn Strange and Michael Kempa, ‘Shades of Dark Tourism: Alcatraz and Robben Island’, Annals ofTourism Research 30, no. 2 (April 2003): 386–405.

45Gil Eyal, ‘Identity and Trauma: Two Forms of the Will to Memory’, History and Memory 16, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2004): 5–36; Kevin Blackburn, ‘War Memory and Nation Building in South East Asia’, South East Asia Research 18, no. 1 (March2010): 5–31; Margaret Mitchell, Remember Me: Constructing Immortality: Beliefs on Immortality, Life, and Death (Abingdon,UK: Routledge, 2007).

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in a country where the current government are far from comfortable with the recent past.It is widely acknowledged that between 1.5 and 2 million Cambodians died during the ruleof the Khmer Rouge.46 Today, the country contains 167 former Security Offices and 19,440mass graves. The mass graves hold the bodies of those deliberately executed, but they donot contain or record the young, the old, or the sick who died along the road in the forcedevacuations, nor those who died frommalnutrition, forced labour, paucity of medicines, orother causes.

S-21 and the other major site associated with the Khmer Rouge, Choeung Ek (com-monly known as ‘the Killing Field’), challenge the simplistic and idealistic imagery thatpresents Cambodia as a ‘gentle land’ with a people locked in the embrace of TheravadaBuddhism’s peaceful doctrines. Such perspectives disregard the documented existenceof past violence and genocide as evidenced at these sites. Whilst other independent repo-sitories of evidence exist, such as the Documentation Centre of Cambodia (DC-Cam), theyare much less likely to be visited by tourists.47

The selective and partial interpretation of the recent past has influenced Cambodia’sfailure to punish, or even remove from positions of authority, those responsible for actsof genocide. The delayed response of the Cambodian government and the internationalcommunity to the overwhelming evidence is both astonishing and tragic. After sevenyears of negotiation, the Cambodian government agreed with the UN to bring to trialthe surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge in October 2004. Putting no more than 10 indi-viduals in total on trial seemed to be only a partial solution. Moreover, the number ofleaders who were tried and successfully sentenced to life in prison in 2017 were justthree: Nuon Chea (Brother Number Two), Kang Kek Ieu (the former Director of S-21)and Khieu Samphan (former Khmer Rouge Head of State).48 The overt resistance bythe Prime Minister Hun Sen to an expanded trial has ensured this will be the last trialof any perpetrator of the genocide. As a former Khmer Rouge soldier himself, Hun Senhas not faced legal redress and in 2017, he was responsible for the abolition of the mainopposition party and essentially Cambodian democracy.49

For those who aim to understand this complex country and its tragic recent history,dark tourism and the visitation of sites such as S-21 provide an experience that is eviden-tial, commemorative, and educational in a country where both democracy and freedom ofspeech cannot be taken for granted. Clearly, in some locations the narrative remains

46For contrasting assessment of the scale of the genocide, see Karl D. Jackson, ed., Cambodia 1975–1978: Rendezvous withDeath (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Central Intelligence Agency, Kampuchea: A Demographic Cata-strophe (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1980); Michael Vickery, ‘Democratic Kampuchea: Themesand Variations’, in Cambodia 1975–1982, ed. David Chandler (Boston: South End Press, 1984), 178–98.

47DC-Cam was established in 1995 by Yale University’s Cambodian Genocide Program, to facilitate training and fieldresearch in Cambodia. It was created to collect as much data as possible of the Khmer Rouge period and hasamassed hundreds of thousands of documents, photographs, and evidence of the genocide. DC-Cam is a not-for-profit, non-government, non-political, and non-judicial body. It is internationally-funded and acknowledged as indepen-dent and non-partisan. The Centre is a major source of information about the period 1975–79 based on impartial inquiryinto facts and history. For further details see www.dccam.org.

48Seth Mydans, ‘Khmer Rouge Trial, Perhaps the Last, Nears End in Cambodia’, The New York Times, June 23, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/world/asia/cambodia-khmer-rouge-vietnam.html (accessed July 17, 2018); Seth Mydans,‘11 Years, $300 Million and 3 Convictions. Was the Khmer Rouge Tribunal Worth It?’, The New York Times, April 10, 2017,2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/10/world/asia/cambodia-khmer-rouge-united-nations-tribunal.html (accessedJuly 17).

49Oliver Holmes, ‘“Death of Democracy” in Cambodia as Court Dissolves Opposition’, The Guardian, November 16, 2017,https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/16/death-of-democracy-cambodia-court-dissolves-opposition-hun-sen(accessed July 17, 2018).

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problematic. Operators of tourist attractions that constitute a major learning experiencefor some visitors have to be aware that they have potential to influence the historical,social, and cultural meanings represented. The selection, interpretation, and conservationof elements of the past are critical in understanding what is considered and how it isrepresented.50

Dark tourism sites provide multiple narratives around tragic events. They offer a rangeof content driven by influences as diverse as simple commercial gain to the complex inter-action of political, economic, and ideological agendas.51 In each case, interpretation articu-lates heritage through objects, artefacts, audio recording, place, or imagery. These elementsexist in environment(s) of their creation. In the case of Cambodia, this occurs in a nationthat has only a selective acceptance of its role in this genocide. Historical memorialisationremains embedded in interests that are global, commercial, and ideological but rarelyneutral.

Rice: In Williamson Park, Lancaster, there is a stone bench, one of three in that area of thecity. It is inscribed with the name Rev. T. Wright London, 1863. This act of philanthropyfrom a metropolitan clergyman to his northern countrymen, an offer of a sleeping shelterto the vagrant poor, is one of the few signs left of a deadly event that impacted the entireLancashire region, the Lancashire Cotton Famine. Lancaster was one of 29 towns in thecounty that handed out extra amounts of Poor Relief in the period 1861–64. This camein the wake of the cotton embargo by the Union North that attempted to destroy theeconomy of the Confederate South during the American Civil War. The devastating econ-omic effects on Lancashire cotton mills meant that thousands from all over the world(including the Pope and President Lincoln) donated to ameliorate the conditions ofworkers. Hundreds of thousands of male, female, and child labourers were laid offduring the horror years of 1862–63 and some were forced into vagrancy while untold hun-dreds died as a consequence of poverty-induced famine. Williamson Park’s beautifulgardens, walkways, and water features were hewn out of the quarry on the edge oftown through public works to keep idle hands at work. It was the labour of the ex-cotton workers which created the splendour of the park. The bench is really the onlyextant memorial of their labour in a park which glories in memorialising the industrialistJames Williamson, who later built a Taj Mahal-like memorial to his deceased wife at thecentre of the park.

The bench is an amazingly resonant, if simply constructed, intersectional symbol. Ithighlights class exigencies through its remembering of the workers. It draws attentionto gender in that as Sven Beckert asserts in his seminal study, The Cotton Empire: ‘Wetend to recall industrial capitalism as male-dominated, whereas women’s labour largelycreated the empire of cotton’.52 Finally, it evokes race because the Confederate Statesbuilt an economy where cotton was king on the backs of a slave system that relied onnearly four million slaves by 1860. There is no plaque on the bench to make these links

50For useful discussion see G.J. Ashworth, ‘The Memorialisation of Violence and Tragedy: Human Trauma as Heritage’, in TheAshgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity, ed. Peter Howard and Brian Graham (London: Routledge, 2008),231–44; Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage (London: Routledge, 2006).

51Martin Gegner, ‘War Monuments in East and West Berlin: Cold War Symbols or Different Forms of Memorial?’, in The Heri-tage of War, 64–87.

52Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Vintage, 2014), xviii.

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and an explanatory panel in the permanent exhibition in the Ashton Memorial has acursory explication which fails to situate the philanthropy in its full context. Thetragedy the exhibit concentrates on is the personal tragedy of James Williamson, LordAshton, who reportedly never recovered from the bereavement attendant on the deathof his wife, whose monument can still be seen for miles around as it bestrides thishighest point in the city. The warning from history then is that we should not beblinded by the light of extravagant memorialisation by those in power, for it will oftenelide darker and so-called minority histories.

Dark tourism might be very interested in the death and memorialisation in WilliamsonPark, however, a politically astute dark tourism would look beneath the memorial’s stagedmagnificence to find histories that it occludes. Many of these histories are not writtendown or are lost in obscure documents and must be discovered in the interstices of thearchives and beyond. Many of them are being discovered as we speak. Hence, the autobio-graphy of the ex-slave James Johnson makes links between these intersectional historiesand exemplifies the vagrants’ life that benches like the Reverend’s helped succour. Hedid not get as far north as Lancaster in his vagrancy but his is an exemplary journey occa-sioned by the Cotton Famine. His pamphlet, The Life of the Late James Johnson, ColouredEvangelist: An Escaped Slave from the Southern States of America, 40 Years Resident inOldham (1914), details the wandering of Johnson on his arrival in Britain in December1862 at the height of extreme unemployment and its attendant misery:

I was worse now than ever – cotton stockings and a pair of slippers in bleak December,friendless and homeless, roaming the streets of Liverpool. I walked over to Southport, andfinding nothing to do, walked by Ormskirk to St. Helens, on to Warrington, thence to Man-chester; again on to Wigan, Huddersfield, Leeds, York, Beverley and Hull, where I took tosinging, dancing and rattlebones, which I found was easier than begging.53

James Johnson’s torturous wanderings through Northern England in December 1862 areunremarkable for a working-class man seeking employment at the height of the Lanca-shire Cotton Famine. Yet his sojourn was different and, despite the hardship, strangely lib-erating, for he had played his part in the Civil War that had caused the embargo of cottonwhich had created these awful conditions. An African American slave, escaping to Unionlines earlier in 1862, he had withdrawn his enforced labour from the Confederate causeand had then travelled to Britain to ensure his freedom away from a country stained bythe ‘Peculiar Institution’. Finally settling in Oldham a few miles away, his brief autobiogra-phy was published posthumously in 1914 by his Lancashire-born daughter and lay almostcompletely unread until its rediscovery during the bicentenary of the abolition of the slavetrade commemorations in 2007. Such working-class black voices are rare in VictorianBritain, especially beyond London, but their uncovering is vital to tell the fully nuancedstory of working-class and black people in Britain. His wanderings took him on roundtripsof over 300 miles before he settled in Oldham. His description of himself without propershoes or woollen warmers in a harsh winter environment shows his desperate circum-stances in what he was hoping was his promised land of freedom away from the slave-infested American polity. For Johnson, vagrancy and extreme hunger in Britain did atleast have the sweet smell of freedom.

53James Johnson, The Life of the Late James Johnson, Coloured Evangelist: An Escaped Slave from the Southern States ofAmerica, 40 Years Resident in Oldham, England (Oldham: W. Galley, 1914), 13.

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Autobiographical accounts, such as Johnson’s, interrupt lazy narratives of imperialand mercantile glory that are over-reliant on great men theories of history. Througha politicised dark tourism, their narratives can play a role in creating more dynamic,radical models of historiography which are urgently needed in even the most con-ventional of tourist sites. For it is the willingness to work through multiple chron-ologies and to foreground multiple memorial standpoints that should guide us.Michael Rothberg addresses the importance of attending to memory’s multiplicities,describing how moving from essentialism, particularism, and competitive victimhoodbetween classes, races, and ethnicities can lead to richer and more politically astuteinterpretations of our complex historical narratives and, I believe, work toward apraxis that builds more sustainable local and national touristic narratives. Hedescribes how:

It is precisely that convoluted, sometimes historically unjustified, back and forth movementof seemingly distant collective memories in and out of public consciousness that I qualify asmemory’s multidirectionality. […] Thinking of memory as multidirectional instead ofcompetitive does not entail dispensing with a notion of the urgency of memory, with itslife-and-death stakes. Rather these examples alert us to the need for a form of comparativethinking that, like memory itself, is not afraid to traverse sacrosanct borders of ethnicityor era.54

In other words, we should work for a memorial praxis that will never be satisfied withunitary narratives (of any ideological persuasion) and be attuned to voices that willmake for a more inclusive and multiply defined historiography. For the warning fromhistory is always to be wary of its hegemonic tendencies and to promote heterogeneousvoices, especially from those who are currently, and have so often before, been excluded.

Reynolds: Philip Stone asks if present-day memorial sites are communicating historicalknowledge effectively to their visitors. Addressing the role of Holocaust memorials specifi-cally, his comment sounds a note of considerable scepticism about their ability to conveythe historical complexities that gave rise to the Nazi genocide. For Stone, the problem withmemorial sites in dark tourism lies in the way they ‘disconnect a (tragic) past from the(fretful) present for our (hopeful) future’. Instead of linking a violent past to unsettlingcircumstances in the present, dark tourism commodifies history as an object weconsume as spectacle. To underscore his scepticism, Stone cites an article from The Guar-dian by Jonathan Jones, who blames Holocaust memorials for failing to prevent the re-emergence of a politically viable far right in Europe.55 If Holocaust memorials arefailing to realise their mission, often formulated in the imperative ‘Never again’, doesthe fault lie with the dark tourists who consume them, or does the fault lie in the memor-ials themselves?

The image of the frivolous tourist fooled by the inauthenticities of the tourismmarket isa well-rehearsed trope in tourism studies, and much of dark tourism theory tends to reca-pitulate it. One of my concerns about dark tourism theory is its tendency to focus on sitesinstead of tourists, whom it tends to characterise as relatively undifferentiated consumers

54Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA:Stanford University Press, 2009), 17.

55Jonathan Jones, ‘War Memorials Have Failed’, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2016/dec/09/war-memorials-have-failed-peter-eisenman-holocaust (accessed May 24, 2018).

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with a taste for the macabre.56 However, a demographic examination of the visitors to sitesof Holocaust remembrance, including longitudinal studies of the shifting makeup of tour-ists over time, would quickly complicate that characterisation. As I write in Postcards fromAuschwitz, Holocaust tourists are too diverse in terms of nationality, religion, age, familybackground, or education to permit such a generalised portrayal.57 Some visitors toBerlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, for example, are vacationers on anurban sight-seeing tour that itself may be configured along any number of themes:Jewish Berlin, Nazi traces in Berlin, the city’s Cold War legacy, or its post-reunificationarchitectural landmarks. Some visitors to Holocaust memorials are individuals undertak-ing a form of pilgrimage to honour victims whomay have been part of one’s family. Othersare school groups on a mandatory visit, sometimes engaging in the kinds of mischief thatschool outings typically invite. Given the variety of participants in Holocaust tourism, itstrikes me as impossible to draw any overarching conclusions about their commitmentto learning about history through tourism.

But even the most earnest tourist may encounter relatively little historical informationat a memorial installation. The abstract form of the some of the most prominent Holo-caust memorials, including ones in Berlin and Vienna, appears to be fuelling Jones’s sus-picion of their inefficacy.58 James E. Young has written extensively about these memorialsas counter-monuments, which are works of commemoration prevalent in Germany andAustria that reject the heroic idiom of traditional monuments. Counter-monuments useabstracted form and negative space (darkness, empty rooms, subterranean installations),leaving it up to their visitors to determine their message. For Young, the debate overmeaning becomes a form of memory work that preserves debate about appropriateways to memorialise the Holocaust.

A recent controversy over tourists at the Berlin memorial illustrates the difficulty inconcluding that abstract memorials do not connect the past to the present. TheGerman-Israeli comedian and activist Shahak Shapira gathered photographs of irreverenttourist behaviour at Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe that had beenposted on social media and, using digital editing software, superimposed the imagesonto historical photos of the Holocaust. Instead of leaping among pillars, for example,the disrespectful tourist appeared to be leaping over mounds of emaciated corpses.59

The media coverage of Shapira’s provocative intervention was extensive, and the individ-uals depicted wrote apologetic requests to have their images removed from the site, towhich Shapira complied. Young’s point about debate over counter-monuments appearscorrect: ‘The question of historical content begins at precisely the moment the questionof memorial design ends. Memory, which has followed history, will now be followed bystill further historical debate’.60

56Lennon and Foley, Dark Tourism; Stone, ‘A Dark Tourism Spectrum’, 145–60. Stone’s typology is a welcome differentiationamong dark tourism sites, but for me calls into question the utility of the term itself.

57Daniel P. Reynolds, Postcards from Auschwitz. Holocaust Tourism and the Meaning of Remembrance (New York: NYU Press,2018).

58Jones’s Guardian article faults Rachel Whiteread’s Judenplatz memorial in Vienna for its alleged reliance on abstraction,though the monument is actually quite figurative in its representation of Jewish culture as a library whose books (andculture generally) are lost to the present.

59Shakak Shapira, ‘Yolocaust’, https://yolocaust.de (accessed June 1, 2018).60James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge. After-images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 2000), 223.

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The notion that memorials lack the capacity to inform visitors about historical com-plexity only makes sense if one ignores the context in which such memorials function.Tourism is but one modality by which we encounter the memory of the Holocaust, andhas to be understood as part of a complex web of efforts to educate the public aboutthe violence of hatred and bigotry. Dark tourism both informs and is informed byother forms of cultural expression and knowledge production. Furthermore, memorialshave to be approached as aesthetic objects that engage affectively with the events they com-memorate. As Saul Friedländer has written, Holocaust memory and Holocaust history areseparate enterprises.61 By situating their Holocaust memorials alongside or inside histori-cal museums, the Holocaust memorials in Berlin, Vienna, Washington, Jerusalem, andelsewhere typically engage in both memory and historiography. By linking aestheticexpression with the historical accounts, these memorials work by appealing to one’ssense of empathy and one’s rational understanding.

In Germany, researchers have begun to study what students learn when visiting sites ofmemory, and the initial findings are encouraging.62 Ultimately, Holocaust memorials andmuseums can educate and invite reflection, but there is no guarantee that historical knowl-edge about intolerance can be realised as progressive political action in the present. Tes-timony by tourists themselves suggest that such visits are deeply meaningful to them, buthow do we assess their subsequent political behaviour? There can be no control group fortesting the efficacy of Holocaust memory in affecting the present course of history, whichfor all its parallels to the past, has to be understood for its own particularities. As SanderGilman, professor of history at Emory University, has recently said about Holocaust edu-cation, ‘If you have a fantasy that that is going to be a kind of vaccination against hate,that’s wonderfully naïve. The rise of anti-Semitism today has to do with situationstoday’.63 Holocaust memorials may succeed or fail in elucidating the present throughthe example of the past. What is certain, however, is that their presence on the dark tour-ist’s itinerary is certainly preferable to their absence.

Hartmann: I would like to applaud Dr. Stone’s thoughtful response written in his unique,evocative prose. Let me repeat one great sentence expressing what dark tourism is and/orin the widest sense could be: ‘ … dark tourism symbolises sites of dissonant heritage, sitesof selected silences, sites rendered political and ideological, sites powerfully intertwinedwith interpretation and meaning, and sites of the imaginary and the imagined’.

In the following I will use some of Stone’s words as a point of departure for my owndiscussion contribution. I agree with his assertion of ‘dark tourism (being/becoming) amulti-disciplinary field’. My question is how did this new field evolve? I argue that thebeginnings of the dark tourism studies tradition are closely tied to a network of tourismresearchers in Northern England and Southern Scotland whose work in the tourismfield was advanced and prospered through new employment opportunities in academe.The uptick in higher education positions has to be seen in the context of the many lost

61See Saul Friedländer, ‘History, Memory, and the Historian: Dilemmas and Responsibilities’, New German Critique, no. 80(Spring-Summer 2000): 3-15.

62Bert Pampel, Mit eigenen Augen sehen, wozu der Mensch fähig ist (Frankfurt a.M.: Campus Verlag, 2007); Elke Gryglewski,Verena Haug, Gottfried Kößler, and Christa Schikorra, eds., Gedenkstättenädagogik: Kontext, Theorie und Praxis der Bildung-sarbeit zu NS-Verbrechen (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2015).

63Ari Feldman, ‘Is Jordan Petersen Enabling Jew Hatred’?, Forward, May 11, 2018, https://forward.com/news/national/400597/is-jordan-petersen-enabling-jew-hatred/ (accessed May 26, 2018).

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jobs in the de-industrialising local and regional economy of the 1970s to 1990s and themerger or foundation of new colleges/universities as a hotbed for research of how tobring back jobs in an economically depressed region. Employment in the services industryincluding tourism services was frequently seen as a panacea for growth.

While the more favourable work conditions for academicians in general and fortourism researchers in particular in the ‘old industrial North’ by the 1990s were importantfactors that allowed for the development of new research foci, it does not explain a newly-found inclination to shed light on the ‘dark side’ of humanity, as it expresses itself insought ‘dark tourism’ experiences. Here, we have to look at the environmental, cultural,and social conditions for a regionally grounded appreciation of ‘darkness’. Is it purely inci-dental that in 2018 subject matters of ‘dark landscapes’ are explored by geographers livingand working in Northern England and Southern Scotland?64 It happens to be the sameregion which once provided the backdrop to the ‘dark tourism’ research tradition in themid-1990s/early and mid-2000s. Such parallels as well as the role of light conditions fortravel and tourism deserve to be examined in an in-depth study.

Stone writes about ‘dark tourism as (being) politically engineered and socially con-structed’. An excellent example for his pertinent observation is the co-existence and cross-over of ‘dark tourism’ and ‘red tourism’ at seismic memorial sites in the People’s Republicof China. In 1976, more than 240 thousand people died due to the Tangshan earthquake.Two different memorials are in place: one praising the efforts made by the CommunistParty of China (CPC) to overcome the tragedy and the other one commemorating atlast the dead, with thousands of names posted on a memorial wall.65 A more recent earth-quake catastrophe that claimed more than 60 thousand lives is the Wenchuan Earthquakeof 2008. Here, four memorial parks and museums were established over the past ten years,sites which have received visitation in the form of ‘dark tourism’66 and ‘red tourism’ gen-erated by government and party organisations to uphold a ‘shaken authority’ of the CPC.67

Stone talks in his retrospective comments about ‘the propensity for secular, death-related travel which continues today’ and – I wish to add – in the future. This leads meto ask the question: What is the future of dark tourism?

Two new types of attractions denoting the dark heritage of humanity will most likelyproliferate: a) sites where humans extinguished other life forms on earth such as thegreat mammoth and b) sites associated with the human displacement of our homosibling, the Neanderthal Man (homo sapiens neanderthalensis). Both will contribute toour understanding of the destructive nature of our species (homo sapiens sapiens).

The Rouffignac Cave in Southwest France is remarkable as it has more than 250 rep-resentations of animal themes which date back to 13,000 to 14,000 BP. The most dominantdepiction is that of the mammoth, with about 150 paintings and edgings typical of

64Nick Dunn and Tim Edensor, ‘Dark Landscapes: New Forms of Experience and Place’ (Sessions 1 and 2 at annual meetingof the Association of American Geographers (AAG), New Orleans, April 13, 2018). These sessions included contributorsfrom the University of Central Lancashire, Lancaster University, Manchester Metropolitan University, the University ofEdinburgh, and the University of Glasgow.

65Shengrong Chen and Honggang Xu, ‘From Fighting Against Death to Commemorating the Dead at Tangshan EarthquakeHeritage Sites’, Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 15, no. 8 (August 2017): 1–22.

66Yong Tang, ‘Dark Tourism to Seismic Memorial Sites’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies, 423–41; YongTang, ‘Contested Narratives at the Hanwang Earthquake Memorial Park: Where Ghost Industrial Town and Seismic Mem-orial Meet’, Geoheritage, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12371-018-0309-9 (accessed July 8, 2018).

67Christian P. Sorace, Shaken Authority: China’s Communist Party and the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake (Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press, 2017).

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Franco-Cantabrian art.68 While it seems that the mammoth had symbolic significance inthe Cro-Magnon culture (late upper Magdalenian period), it has been argued thatadvanced human hunters contributed to the disappearance of these great animals at atime period when climate conditions and the vegetation cover underwent significantchanges around 10,000 BP. Soon after, the mammoth became extinct in Europe, withthe last surviving mammoth species, mammuthus primigenius, recorded in a remotepart of Eastern Siberia four thousand years ago. Rouffignac is also the site of rhinocerosdepictions, a species now fighting for survival in Central/Eastern Africa. I predict, thatwith the greater knowledge we will gain about the destructive, life-ending processes ourspecies has been involved in, this dark side of humanity will be featured at Rouffignacand many other sites for visitation.

Last but not least, it is the coexistence of homo sapiens sapiens and of homo sapiensneanderthalensis over a three to five thousand year period 40–45 thousand years agothat has triggered many speculations regarding how the displacement of the Nean-derthal Man by humans in the southwestern region of Europe may have happened(including violence).69 While recent genetic research has shown that at some pointin human history modern human beings and the Neanderthal Man intermingled andinterbred,70 we are still in the ‘dark’ about how our homo sibling attempted tosurvive in a hostile environment. Was it through assimilation and ultimately absorptionby the more numerous humans or did it come about through a greater aggressionshown by homo sapiens sapiens in securing shelter (caves) and limited food resources(animals & plants)? This troubling, still evolving chapter about the extinction of our‘close relative’ around 39,000 BP will be certainly featured at sites associated withthe Neanderthal Man, at existing sites like the Neander Valley near Düsseldorf,Germany, and new ‘dark tourism’ sites as research results about other fossil findingsbecome available.

Stone: concluding thoughts

Dark tourism is an academic appellation given to exploring tourist sites of significant‘other’ death and the culturally important dead. Yet, despite a long history of people visit-ing sites of death, contemporary dark tourism evokes notions of mass ‘dark tourist’ hordesthat may learn little from heritage that hurts. The idea of a so-called ‘dark tourist’ raisesissues of emergent motivations and experiences of visitors consuming touristic traumas-capes. However, semantic insinuations of ‘darkness’ in dark tourism simply render thetourist to a reductionist, if not macabre, leisure seeker who is somehow deficient in requi-site morals, historic comprehension, and cultural codes, and who possesses an innateinability to be elucidated by memorial messages. All-too-common scholarly tropes oftourism responding to manufactured stimulus and, more importantly, tourists as funda-mentally gullible passive consumers of packaged experiences is simply an indolent

68Jean-Claude Blanchet and Jean-Jacques Cleyet-Merle, Les Eyzies de Tayac et la vallee de la Vezere (Paris: Editions du Patri-moine, 2005).

69Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (New York, NY: Harper Collins,1992).

70David Reich,Who We are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (New York: PantheonBooks, 2018); Jared Diamond, ‘Origin Story: New Genetic Evidence Offers Surprising Revelations about Our Ancient Ances-tors’, The New York Times Book Review, April 22, 2018, 11.

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argument.71 Notwithstanding utility of the term and its contentions, as Reynolds pointsout, to categorise diverse people who visit sites associated with pain or shame as dark –and perhaps in some way deviant – is not only misleading, it is fruitless as a typologicalexercise.72 In other words, ‘there can never be a so-called “dark tourist” as a defined tax-onomy because to consume tourism is to consume experiences’.73

Consequently, I suggest there is no such thing as a ‘dark’ tourist in dark tourism – onlypeople engaged in the historic and social reality of their life-worlds. As David Simpsonsuggests, ‘if indeed we are living with the forgetting of history – one of the standardassumptions of the postmodern – then even the possibility of a serious reckoning withdark [tourism] sites might go some way toward correcting our myopia’.74 Furthermore,it matters little if agreement cannot be reached amongst the intelligentsia of what is orwhat is not dark in dark tourism. Arguably, what matters more is scholarly recognitionof difficult heritage sites that seek to interpret historic cultural trauma that perturbs ourcollective consciousness. It is here that the tourist experience becomes paramount,rather than initial commitment of learning tragic history through tourism encounters.It is perhaps, therefore, less important to focus upon motives of why people participatein dark tourism but, rather, focus on emergent corollaries of the tourist experience.

Hence, questions of how, why, and where particular cultural trauma is remembered andexperienced within the visitor economy remain at the crux of dark tourism scholarship.This round table discussion has sought to illuminate some of these questions, particularlythose focused on dark tourism as both concept and historical practice, as well as bringinginto focus broader processes of memorialisation and memory multiplicities. If difficultheritage is the production and presentation of tragic history, then dark tourism is the con-sumption and experience of that history. In turn, dark tourism becomes an institution ofmortality mediation where co-creation of meaning between heritage-producer andtourist-consumer is made. It is within this intersection of heritage and tourism thatmeaning-making dichotomies in learning, interpretation, and traumatic (his)stories areexposed. Thus, after my previous remarks of memorial efficacy, John Lennon offers a criti-cal insight of dark tourism within a meaning-making process of evidence and education.Highlighting the Cambodian genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s,Lennon outlines inherent issues of dissonant heritage and a selective recall of the genocidalpast. However, while he recognises broader implications of intergenerational learning, thetransmission of tragic history through tourism, as well as identity and political narratives,cross-cultural aspects and Western biases of dark tourism are also important. In short, theboom in Cambodian memorials within the context of international tourism, combinedwith a distinct lack of perpetrator prosecution and conflicted politics of reconciliation,means that ‘Killing Fields’ sites are often (re)presented to Western tourists as evidenceof atonement and remembrance of victims.75 Yet, the apparent tourist experience that

71Dean MacCannell, The Ethics of Sightseeing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).72Philip R. Stone, ‘The “Dark Tourist” Experience’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism; Philip R. Stone and RichardSharpley, ‘Deviance, Dark Tourism and “Dark Leisure”: Towards a (Re)configuration of Morality and the Taboo inSecular Society’, in Contemporary Perspectives in Leisure: Meanings, Motives and Lifelong Learning, ed. Sam Elkingtonand Sean Gammon (Abington, Oxon: Routledge, 2013), 54–64.

73Stone, ‘The “Dark Tourist” Experience’, 510.74David Simpson, review of Death Tourism, edited by Brigitte Sion, Critical Quarterly 59, no. 1 (April 2017): 141.75Brigitte Sion, ‘Conflicting Sites of Memory in Post-genocide Cambodia’, Humanity: An International Journal of HumanRights, Humanitarianism, and Development 2, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 1–21; Cathlin Goulding, ‘Living with Ghosts, Living

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is ‘evidential, commemorative and educational’ is played out against a Buddhist doctrineof karma, ancestor worship, and ritual, and a fundamental difference in the theology ofdeath and soteriology of the main Asian religious traditions.76 Therefore, multiple andcontested difficult heritage narratives are both produced and consumed at these visitormemorial sites and, as Lennon reminds us, these chronicles are embedded within ideologi-cal interests that are never neutral.

This lack of neutrality is a theme highlighted by Alan Rice in his perceptive account ofWilliamson Park, Lancaster, UK. Williamson Park (an area I know well) offers contem-porary visitors a romantic rural idyll carved out of urbanity, and directly from themind-set of Victorian elites. Against backdrops of a far-away Civil War, local famineand national industrial strife, the bucolic landscape and botanical gardens of WilliamsonPark are essentially built upon foundations of social misery. As centrepiece to the park, theresplendent if not prodigal memorial from Lord Ashton in the shape of Ashton Memorial(to his dead wife) dominates the landscape both literally and figuratively. However, as Riceelucidates, the memorial occludes minority histories of the working classes and blackpopulace that are hidden if not forbidden and, thus, tourism to the park disseminates amemorial message that is only partially told. Consequently, Rice calls for a more politicallyastute dark tourism that, in this case, addresses lazy narratives of imperial and mercantileglory. It is here that memorial efficacy is once again called into question within the visitoreconomy, as radical and inclusive models of historiography are urgently required at darktourism sites. Otherwise, as Rice quite rightly advocates, touristic memorials will renderany warning from history to prevailing hegemonic tendencies and, subsequently, stagememorials that exclude minority voices and victims.

Daniel Reynolds raises issues of memorial hegemony and affective design in his replyabout dark tourism commodifying history as objects of spectacle. Specifically, Reynoldsnotes my scepticism of whether artistically abstract memorials that require inventiveand cultural decoding adequately convey commemorative messages to the masses.However, with co-creating meaning processes inherent within dark tourism, the issueof creative abstraction, ‘relational architecture’ and counter-monumentalism – or evenanti-monumentalism77 – is perhaps more about conserving difficult heritage debatesthan commemorating the dead. If this is the case, then the tragic dead are kept alive atprovocative memory sites whereby imaginative renditions of trauma intersect with themass visitor economy. It is here that Reynolds notes ‘irreverent and disrespectful touristbehaviour’ at such sites, though such behaviour should be tempered with broadernotions of moral relativism. Indeed, Simpson argues in the case of dark tourism that‘no one, even when faced with a landscape of gift shops and cafeterias, parked busesand crowds with cameras and selfie-sticks, should be presumed incapable of respectfulbehaviour and serious meditation’.78 Yet, by using Shahak Shapira’s ‘Yolocuast’ controver-sial art demonstration, in which certain (seemingly misbehaving) tourists are essentiallyblackmailed via social media exposure, Reynolds suggests Berlin’s Memorial to the

Otherwise: Pedagogies of Haunting in Post-genocide Cambodia’, in (Re)constructing Memory: Education, Identity, andConflict, ed. James H. Williams and Michelle J. Bellino (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2017), 241–68.

76Erik Cohen, ‘Thanatourism: A Comparative Approach’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies, 157–71.77Rafael Lozana-Hemmer, ‘Alien Relationships from Public Space’, interview by Alex Adriaansens and Joke Brouwer, inTransUrbanism (Rotterdam: V2_Publishing, 2002), 155.

78Simpson, review of Death Tourism, 141.

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Murdered Jews of Europe is a counter-monument that requires pre-conditioning of tour-ists in order for it to inform historical complexities of the Holocaust. Arguably, therefore,leaving memorials within dark tourism to artistic abstraction may mean any aestheticexpression is simply that – an expression of the art rather than affective empathy withthe memorial message. That said, however, Reynolds rightly argues that despite intrinsiccomplexities of difficult heritage, and regardless of memorial design and its semiotics, thepresence of memorials within dark tourism is preferable to their absence. In so doing,Reynolds reminds us that memory management within dark tourism involves a constella-tion of meanings, memories, emotions, and narratives. To that end, memorials matter, butit is our use of them within dark tourism that will make them matter – for better or worse.

The idea of ‘for better or worse’ is a final point raised by Rudi Hartmann in his variousremarks. In his discourse of conceptual overlap between ‘dark’ and ‘red’ tourism, Hart-mann notes earthquake disasters in China have witnessed memorials that are imbuedwith commemoration as well as Communist encounters with the dead. Certainly, recentmass visitations to quake sites in China suggest a form of ‘phoenix tourism’ is occurring.79

Therefore, instead of locating tourism within the context of economic regeneration in apost-disaster, tourism is located in a social and political milieu – in this case,Communism – and memorials espouse disaster stewardship, party political power, anda Communist mantra. However, Hartmann ends on a prophetic note of humankind’sdestructive tendencies. Indeed, these destructive tendencies are often the stuff of darktourism, and history is stuffed with destructive events. The ‘dark side of humanity’,according to Hartmann at least, will fuel the future of dark tourism and guarantee a‘dark past’ ripe for consumerism.80

Nevertheless, despite these cautionary forewarnings, this round table discussion hassought to shine light on dark tourism. Ultimately, dark tourism scholarship bridges thelink between difficult heritage and its consumption within the broader visitor economy.Tourists as potential ‘makers of historical knowledge’ means that touristic experiencesbear witness to the tragic past as well dispense knowledge in the present-day.81 It ishere that a new willingness to question historical narratives and interrogate processes ofremembrance has emerged. Dealing with the difficult past is an arduous and contestedprocess, and one that cannot be solved through simple erection of monuments – abstractor otherwise. Instead, dark tourism should embody processes of collective memory andmeaning making, whereby visitor sites serve as affective places of functional interactionand sensible dialogue. If that is the case, then dark tourism and concomitant experiencesof memorials and monuments will be a starting position, rather than an end point, forsociety’s critical engagement with its painful past.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

79Senija Causevic and Paul Lynch, ‘Phoenix Tourism: Post-conflict Tourism Role’, Annals of Tourism Research 38, no. 3 (July2011): 780-800.

80D.W. Wright, ‘Hunting Humans: A Future for Tourism in 2200’, Futures 78–79 (April–May 2016): 34–46; D.W. Wright,‘Terror Park: A Future Theme Park in 2100’, Futures 96 (November 2017): 1–22.

81Daniel P. Reynolds, ‘Consumers or Witnesses? Holocaust Tourists and the Problem of Authenticity’, Journal of ConsumerCulture 16, no. 2 (July 2016): 334–53.

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Notes on contributors

Rudi Hartmann is a Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences at theUniversity of Colorado Denver. His research interests include heritage tourism, ecotourism, andsustainable tourism planning. Hartmann is the author of numerous essays about heritagetourism and Holocaust tourism, and he is a co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of DarkTourism Studies.

John Lennon is the Director of the Moffat Centre for Travel and Tourism Business Development atGlasgow Caledonian University. He has undertaken over 500 tourism and travel projects in over 35nations, including major projects on behalf of the private sector and public sector clients. Lennon isalso the author of over 80 articles and five books on the travel and tourism industry, including DarkTourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster, co-authored with Malcolm Foley.

Daniel P. Reynolds is Seth Richards Professor in Modern Languages in the German Department atGrinnell College. His past publications include articles on modernist, postcolonial, and contempor-ary German literature. Reynolds has done extensive research on tourism at Nazi extermination andconcentration camps, deportation memorials, museums, and other commemorative sites of theHolocaust, and he is the author of Postcards from Auschwitz: Holocaust Tourism and theMeaning of Remembrance.

Alan Rice is a Professor in English and American Studies in the School of Humanities and SocialSciences at the University of Central Lancashire. He is an expert in the field of the ’Black Atlantic’,and his scholarship has led to collaborative projects with museums and community organisations.Rice has published numerous articles and essays about the legacy of slavery, as well as books likeRadical Narratives of the Black Atlantic and Creating Memorials, Building Identities: The Politicsof Memory in the Black Atlantic.

Adam T. Rosenbaum is an Associate Professor of History at Colorado Mesa University in GrandJunction, Colorado. He is the author of Bavarian Tourism and The Modern World, 1800–1950, andis currently working on his second book project, an expansive history of travel from massmigrations to mass tourism. Rosenbaum serves as the Associate Editor of the Journal of TourismHistory.

Philip R. Stone is the Executive Director of the Institute for Dark Tourism Research at the Univer-sity of Central Lancashire. He has an extensive commercial background within the UK privatesector, as well as a PhD in Thanatology. Stone has published extensively in the area of darktourism and heritage. He is the co-author of The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practiceof Dark Tourism (with Richard Sharpley), the editor of Current Issues in Dark Tourism Research,and the editor-in-chief of The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies.

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