Postcolonial ambivalence as per the tourist

Abstract

This article aims to understand the ways in which ambivalence toward postcolonial mimetic places is exposed in touristic consumption. This article is a single case study investigating Bà Nà Hills, which was initially constructed by the French colonialists and afterwards developed into an entertainment park in Vietnam. Ethnographic research by using face-to-face techniques such as in-depth interviewing and participant observation was undertaken. Findings show the ways in which ambivalent emotional subjectivities coexist between ‘searching for authenticity’ and ‘embracing simulacra’. This article proposes that a postcolonial equivocatory place generates and regulates tourists' ambivalence between the complexities of authenticity and simulacra and that, ambivalence functions as a bridge and an interpretive and analytic tool between individual emotional experience and social changes.

Introduction

Tourism studies that adopt critical postcolonial analysis have largely advanced our understanding of the touristic development of formerly colonised countries from a discursive perspective (Ashcroft et al., 2006; Bandyopadhyay, 2022; Bandyopadhyay & Morais, 2005; Bell, 2004; Buckley, 2013; Chadha, 2006; Chambers & Buzinde, 2015; Huggan, 2001; Keen & Tucker, 2012; Royle, 1997) and contribute to developing further critical discussions on otherness (Aitchison, 2016; Caton & Santos, 2008; Prasad & Prasad, 2003; Said, 1978; Staszak, 2008b), exoticism (Amirou, 2001; Huggan, 2001; Nayar, 2018; Staszak, 2008a) and authenticity (Nayar, 2018; Wong, 2013; Zhu, 2012). Under the (post)colonial scheme (Said, 1978), the cult of authenticity has been applied to construct ‘exotic’, ‘primitive’, and ‘pure’ of the ethnic and cultural other (Huggan, 2001; Peyvel, 2009) and also engaged to perpetuating such colonial stereotypes (Hollinshead, 1998b). However, authenticity, purity and originality have been further criticised to reverse the hierarchical dualism of the coloniser and the colonised through an original and copy paradigm (Bhabha, 1994; Hollinshead, 1998b). Bhabha's (1994) intervention involves the displacement and transformation of colonial stereotypes to reveal and subvert the fallacy of assertive assumptions about authenticity that are bound up within hegemonic and hierarchical representational structures. Several tourism scholars have accordingly focused on debating differences and otherness within Bhabha's discourses such as ‘hybridity’, ‘third places’ and ‘interstitial culture’, which disrupt and challenge the binaries of authentic/inauthentic and allow a more nuanced understanding of ‘othering’ which inevitably locates in power relations (Amoamo, 2011; Chakrabarti, 2010; Cho, 2021; Hollinshead, 1998a, 1998b, 2016). Their analysis has tended to avoid only linking ‘othering’ with authenticity in terms of tourism management and practice without questioning the complexities of cultural production, hybridization and processes of identification which lie under the surface.

In the quest and negation for authenticity, tourism has significantly contributed to stirring debates on authenticity and developing different perspectives for a better understanding of its complexity (Belhassen & Caton, 2006; Canavan & McCamley, 2021; Cohen, 1988; Cohen & Cohen, 2012; MacCannell, 1973; Moore & al., 2021; Wang, 1999; Zhu, 2012). Authenticity has eventually become one of the oldest and most discussed notions in tourism studies (Rickly, 2022). Discussions in tourism literature recently suggest that authenticity is a negotiation process (Canavan & McCamley, 2021; Halewood & Hannam, 2001; Liu et al., 2015; Rickly-Boyd, 2013) not only of real and fake (or authentic or inauthentic) (Andriotis, 2009; Wang, 1999) but also of reality and fantasy (Canavan & McCamley, 2021). Canavan and McCamley (2021, p. 5) further highlight that it concerns “contextual human strategies for negotiating the inner conflict such as avoidance, fantasy and inauthenticity, versus confrontation, reality and authenticity”. Even though the hierarchical claims of purity, originality or authenticity are invalid (Bhabha, 1994) and the claim for authenticity has been regarded as a cynical one, as “nothing can ever be added without purity being seen to be lost” (Amoamo, 2011, p. 1258; Schouten, 2007), the discourse and praxis of tourism management have demonstrated that authenticity represents strong importance and relevance to tourism and such authenticity is derived from the ongoing negotiation of tourists' inner conflict. Therefore, by exploring ambivalence, which refers to a human inner conflict between opposing reactions, beliefs or feelings, as well as the experience of having such an attitude toward objects, places, and people that contain both positively and negatively valenced components, this article aims to zoom in on authenticity in tourism and to observe tourists’ negotiation for authenticity in postcolonial tourism encounters. It may offer a valuable opportunity to examine emotions, attitudes or dispositions (Deleuze, 1992; Jovanović, 2016) of an individual and of the inner workings of the self in the reproduction and reinterpretation of postcolonial places.

Conflicting, contradictory and ambivalent emotions, thoughts and attitudes are one fundamental characteristic of human life (Berliner et al., 2016), which is rendered from the cognitive, emotional and social processes occurring in all human lives (Merton & Barber, 1963). The postcolonial discourse is particularly prone to producing emotions and feelings of ambivalence (Bhabha, 1994; Chadha, 2006). The exploration of “ambivalent statements, contradictory attitudes, incompatible values, and emotional internal clashes as research objects” and the demonstration of “how actors themselves live with and justify their contradictory thoughts and behaviours” (Berliner, 2016, p. 5–6) have already been critically problematized. In varying (post)colonial discourses (Bhabha, 1994; Chadha, 2006), most of the discussions have focused on a contested and conflicted political position toward colonial heritage from postcolonial perspectives (Breglia, 2009; Chadha, 2006; Leung, 2009; McLaren, 2006). However, even though tourism tends to “generate consistently ambivalent or contradictory representations” (Crick, 1989, p. 307) and tourism studies, which have adopted postcolonial perspectives, have significantly increased in volume (Amoamo, 2011; Caton & Santos, 2008; Chambers & Buzinde, 2015; Cho, 2021; Echtner & Prasad, 2003; Hall & Tucker, 2007; Keen & Tucker, 2012; Tucker, 2019; Wijesinghe, 2020; Zhang et al., 2022), unfortunately, the tourist's emotional depth of ambivalence is not thoroughly developed. Little scholastic investigation has focused on tourists' conflicting relationships with the past and the other in the postcolonial heritage context while overlooking that ambivalence studies can be extended further. Furthermore, the term ‘ambivalence’ has been hardly applied in tourism studies. The range, profundity and diversity of ambivalence felt, perceived and thought by tourists and its relevance to tourism studies remain unrevealed even though understanding the ambivalence would be a critical issue that tourism stakeholders and researchers should approach with more attention. Bhabha (1994), who thoroughly developed the notion of ambivalence, insists that ambivalence presents a split; doubled experience at the site of colonial dominance. Hollinshead (1998a, 1998b, 2016), who first interpreted Bhabha's perspectives to tourism studies, highlights that Bhabha's thinking on ambivalence must “be sensitively connected to the world of tourism” in order “to broaden [the] conceptuality of tourism studies” (Hollinshead, 1998b, p. 153). Therefore, this research aims to respond to these calls by way of critically analysing the ambivalence to understand the projection of authenticity within tourism imaginaries, experiences and practices.

Grounded in an interpretivist phenomenological approach with an emphasis on the nature and meanings of tourists being experienced and articulated as a particular phenomenon, the values of tourists as social actors in the construction of social knowledge (Berger & Luckmann, 1967) and the significance of interpretation as an intrinsic process of research (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000; Guba & Lincoln, 1989), this study employs ethnographic methods to understand the lived experiences and imaginaries of tourists in Bà Nà Hills, located in the Trường Sơn Mountains of the city of Da Nang, in central Vietnam. In postcolonial Vietnam, mimicking, imitating and copying Otherness have been further used to construct equivocal colonial places. The hill stations of Vietnam are representative postcolonial mimetic places located “in the paradox between the planned resort and the chaos, the dissonance” (Jennings, 2007, p. 329). Becoming ‘like but not quite’ (Bhabha, 1984) has been strategically designed in Bà Nà Hill for capitalistic benefits and advantages from tourism (Van, 2019) as if mimic-man strategically benefits from his ambivalent location and functions (Bhabha, 1984) since “the desire for mimicry of the colonized subverts practically his location from one of disadvantage to one of advantage” (Chakrabarti, 2010, p. 22). Bà Nà Hills per se represent as “ambivalent spaces” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 160), which stem from colonial heritages (Bhabha, 1994; Chadha, 2006; Jørgensen, 2019) and are being created by the postcolonial mimicry, concerned with constructing the self and social identity on Otherness. Their spatial ambivalence may largely contribute to the construction of tourism imaginaries (Salazar, 2012) and cultural constitutions of place (Oakes, 1997) and may also allow observing the ways in which such ambivalence can be experienced in relation to authenticity.

Ethnographic research by using face-to-face techniques such as in-depth interviewing and participant observation was undertaken from March to November in 2019. Given that this research focuses particularly on looking at ambivalent, antithetical and contradictory ways in which tourists negotiate, articulate and perceive a colonial past and colonial places in their experiences and tourism imaginaries (Gravari-Barbas & Graburn, 2012; Salazar, 2012) emphasising the function of producing meanings and the product of this function of tourism imaginaries (Ricoeur, 1994), the selected interview skills and processes were expected to encourage tourists to express their emotions, thoughts, “expected experiences, hoped for or feared at the destination, the practices these experiences induce” (Gravari-Barbas & Graburn, 2012), which is considered useful for discovering tourism imaginaries in less inhibited ways. This study is mainly concerned with indicating how tourists approach postcolonial equivocatory places and how tourists represent themselves and are represented to propose concrete examples of postcolonial ambivalence in the Bà Nà Hills of Vietnam. The ways in which opposing emotional and cognitive orientations toward colonial traces exist in touristic experiences from the postcolonial perspectives may potentially encompass a range of emotional opposites requiring ongoing negotiation as one of the repertoires of tourists and contribute to the close investigation of tourists’ reactions and negotiation toward a colonial story and place as well as authenticity that has been often taken as ambiguous, inconsistent, uncertain or disoriented.