Abstract
The literature on dark tourism has sought to understand tourist’s engagement with a range of sites that are associated with various traumatic events. Indeed, in an earlier paper we interpreted the Chernobyl site from the perspective of dark and toxic tourism (Yankovska and Hannam, 2014). A key problem with much of the literature on dark and toxic tourism is that it has a tendency to conceptualise such sites as being fixed or static when they are open to multiple interpretations—interpretations which are often highly fluid and mobile. This certainly becomes the case when we consider people’s memories of such sites. Indeed, the dynamic role of memory can be traced back to the earlier work of Bartlett (1932: 213) who argued that memories are influenced by the presence of others and by the social and cultural worlds we inhabit:
[r]emembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organized past reactions or experience.
Interviewer: Why do you think so many tourists are visiting Chernobyl Zone?
Respondent: I don’t know; maybe to see our city, see how it was before, understand or explore the difference. It was so beautiful and now it’s just a ghost-city.
Interview: November, 2015.
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Hannam, K., Yankovska, G. (2018). Tourism Mobilities, Spectralities, and the Hauntings of Chernobyl. 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_13
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