Abstract
This chapter examines from a European-Asian perspective the relationship between media representations and the tourist’s imaginations. We use the case of Chinese and Taiwanese tourists in Paris to investigate how these non-European tourists imagine Europe and how these imaginations are being realised, challenged and modified during concrete tourist experiences. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with tourists and field observations, this chapter shows how both the Chinese and Taiwanese tourist imagination of Europe is strongly influenced by popular representations from the media – American Hollywood films in particular. As it turns out, the Chinese and Taiwanese tourist experience of Paris is characterised by an ongoing negotiation between media-inspired fantasies and personal experiences of the ‘real’ Paris. As a result of this, the way these tourists imagined Europe before their visit is reinforced, but also challenged. Chinese and Taiwanese tourists tend to develop a hybrid perspective: they learn Paris in its complexity while reconstituting their own cultural identity vis-a-vis the European other.
To grasp its secret, you should not then begin with the city and move inwards toward the screen; you should begin with the screen and move outwards toward the city.
Baudrillard (1988, p. 56)
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This chapter is the updated version of a paper publication in Tourist Studies (Dung and Reijnders 2013). Our thanks to this journal for their valuable reviews and their permission for (partial) reuse of the existing text.
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Dung, YA.O., Reijnders, S. (2018). Paris Offscreen: Chinese and Taiwanese Tourists in Cinematic Paris. In: Kim, S., Reijnders, S. (eds) Film Tourism in Asia. Perspectives on Asian Tourism. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5909-4_13
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