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Penal Tourism of the Carceral Other as Colonial Narrative

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The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Tourism

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology ((PSIPP))

Abstract

Penal tourism can be traced through what is often referred to as a dark tourism that involves encounters with and memorialization of death and destruction (Carrigan 2014: 237). Dark tourism is reflected in penal tours such as Alcatraz in San Francisco, Pol Pot’s secret prison in Cambodia or the Carleton County Gaol, and gallows in Ottawa that display and narrate, among other things, the torments suffered and the penal hardships of given eras and places (see also Strange and Kempa 2003). Given their prevalence worldwide, an emergent penal tourism scholarship has begun to highlight the cultural and visual significance of such tours. For example, Schrift (2004), looking at tourism as a form of ritualized performance, argues that the Angola prison rodeo serves as a public forum to display prisoners as the “animalistic inmate other” that capitalizes on cultural differences for the spectators.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Stone (2006), as well as Bowman and Pezzullo (2009), for a more complex consideration of “dark tourism.” Generally, the authors argue that what is considered dark tourism does not necessarily fit into black and white categories, particularly given the historical thanatoptic tradition of such visits that serve moral, spiritual, ideological, and even aesthetic rewards.

  2. 2.

    The term postcolonial has been widely criticized for, among other things, conveying an idea of linear progress that telescopes crucial geopolitical distinctions into invisibility (Shohat 1992; McClintoock 1992). While it is important to highlight that the term creates numerous unresolved tensions and contradictions for colonial scholars, it is beyond the scope of this chapter to resolve them here.

  3. 3.

    In the Spirit Matters report (Office of the Correctional Investigator, 2012), it is noted that 23 per cent of the Canadian federal incarcerated population is Indigenous, while only comprising 4 per cent of the general Canadian population. Moreover, these numbers do not include provincial incarceration rates in which some regions of Canada have 80–85 per cent representation of Indigenous peoples (Perreault 2009).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bishop’s University, Sherbrooke, QC, Canada

    Vicki Chartrand

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  1. Vicki Chartrand
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Correspondence to Vicki Chartrand .

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  1. Faculty of Education and Arts, Federation University Australia, Ballarat, Australia

    Jacqueline Z. Wilson

  2. Department of Criminology, University of Leicester, Leicester, United Kingdom

    Sarah Hodgkinson

  3. Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa , Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

    Justin Piché

  4. Department of Criminal Justice, University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

    Kevin Walby

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Chartrand, V. (2017). Penal Tourism of the Carceral Other as Colonial Narrative. In: Wilson, J., Hodgkinson, S., Piché, J., Walby, K. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Tourism. Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56135-0_32

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56135-0_32

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