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“The Smoke of an Eruption and the Dust of an Earthquake”: Dark Tourism, the Sublime, and the Re-animation of the Disaster Location

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Abstract

Juxtaposing Antiquity with the Apocalypse, this chapter explores the re-animation of Pompeii as a disaster tourism trope found used, for example, on the Caribbean island of Montserrat. In so doing, this chapter engages with the question of whether or not there is space in dark tourism debate for the natural disaster, and whether or not dark tourism, then, is a relatively new phenomenon.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Tourism equates to one of Giddens’s (1991: 112) “fateful moments” and in the context of this chapter approximates Rojek’s “fatal attractions” (1993: 136). These visitor experiences are built around contrast. In terms of emotions and arousal, Gillen points out that “tourism can and does provide the opportunity to experience a contrasting emotional landscape, where the familiar self can be felt in an unfamiliar way” (2001, author’s emphasis). For him, these emotions can be bought and sold as commodities open for circulation. In terms of the dark tourism literature, the discussion in this section of the volume is whether or not this commoditisation is a new phenomenon and whether the label dark tourism is sanguine and appropriate to describe what is taking place. Space does not allow engagement with distinctions between “natural” as opposed to the man-made “cultural” disasters (cf. Lowenthal 2005) or the thesis of the disaster as “man-made” constructions arising from ‘modernising pressures’ (cf. Torry 1979: 518; Skinner 2000).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Roehampton, London, UK

    Jonathan Skinner

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  1. Jonathan Skinner
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Central Lancashire, Preston, United Kingdom

    Philip R. Stone

  2. University of Colorado Denver, Denver, USA

    Rudi Hartmann

  3. University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

    Tony Seaton

  4. University of Central Lancashire, Preston, United Kingdom

    Richard Sharpley

  5. Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia

    Leanne White

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Skinner, J. (2018). “The Smoke of an Eruption and the Dust of an Earthquake”: Dark Tourism, the Sublime, and the Re-animation of the Disaster Location. In: R. Stone, P., Hartmann, R., Seaton, T., Sharpley, R., White, L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47566-4_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47566-4_5

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