Sean Smith

My thesis work investigates colonial legacies in contemporary tourism, taking a discourse approach to understand how nineteenth-century ways of seeing continue to permeate the global tourism industry. In this work I look closely at travel writing and accompanying visual cultures in the nineteenth century, particularly among Victorian travelers through whom a close association between colonialism and the nascent international tourism industry developed. It was in the period of British imperial expansion that a mode I describe as the colonial picturesque coalesced, a sentimentality and aesthetic that underpins much of how tourists are today taught to see other, especially formerly colonized destinations. I have written about the colonial picturesque in the journal Studies in Travel Writing, while I have sought to demonstrate its present invocations in such contemporary spaces as Instagram in the journals Postcolonial Studies and Social Semiotics. Presently, I am focusing on how conceptions of authenticity and a tourist “frontier” were constructed during the nineteenth century, as I seek to draw out this historical resonance through my case study in the Southeast Asian country of Myanmar.

Google Scholar profile: 

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=JBvaw6YAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra