In his 1933 book The Tourist Movement: An Economic Study, F. W. Ogilvie noted that [i]n general, the international aspect of the tourist movement is now so widely recognised as important that there is hardly a country in the world which does not devote public money in one way or another to the development of tourist facilities, with the special object of attracting foreign visitors (vii). Ogilvie was commenting on a stage in the evolution of modern tourism that is still with us, though in highly intensified form. In the aftermath of the First World War, European nations made the first, in retrospect rather tentative, moves toward establishing official structures for the solicitation and organization of tourist traffic through their regions. Revitalizing some old ideas about the role of travel in the promotion of international understanding, systematic tourism presented itself as the great peacemaker - a flattering self-portrait it did not relinquish throughout the era of world wars. In a celebratory history of the Thomas Cook company published in 1953, John Pudney voiced an "abomination of all that restricts travel" and proclaimed that travel agencies like Cook's, "implying liberty of choice and circulation, [were] the very antithesis of war" (Pudney dedication, 173). One textbook designed for "college and university courses in tourism" as well as for "chambers of commerce, tourism promotion and development corporations, tourist accommodations and other businesses, transport and carrier firms, oil companies, automobile manufacturers and deals [et al.]" concludes with "A Philosophy of Tourism and Peace," which marshals such authorities as Marco Polo, St. Augustine, and the Holiday Inn publication Passport in support of its claim that sensitively-managed world tourism can open our minds to "the unity that exists in the family of man throughout the world" (McIntosh and Goeldner 354). An unrestrained global tourism can make the world safer for - more tourism.
In order to realize this version of the Enlightenment end-of-history dream, the many actors and agencies involved in tourism would have to coordinate and concentrate their efforts as never before, and the textbook authors looked forward to a time when, "[a]s tourism grows and matures, the industry will become more united and speak with a single voice . . . [when] [f]irms will become larger, and the weak links in tourism's chain of services will be eliminated" (xii). As Ogilivie had seen in 1933, the task of bringing this rather ominous-sounding future to pass could only proceed under the auspices of states: a globalizing tourist industry pressured states to organize themselves for tourism or be left behind. The textbook writers echoed and surpassed Ogilvie in noting that "practically every country in the world is now looking to tourism as an important factor in national prosperity and realizing that results cannot be achieved by 'hit or miss' methods" (xiii). Governments' collaboration with transport and travel agencies to stimulate and reward tourist demand tightened the circle of tourist expectations and responses which had been the subject of much wary nineteenth-century comment. States would now increasingly take the lead in identifying which "attractions" tourists could be induced to visit and in organizing the flow of tourist traffic to and around those sites. In the process, what we might call the touristic consciousness of various nations -that is, the rough consensus among visitors or potential visitors about what distinguished those nations from each other and made them worth visiting -hitherto sustained largely by anecdote and private enterprise, now approached a systematic articulation, as states assumed the responsibility to represent their nations to the tourist market. Today the most cursory tour of the World Wide Web will furnish dozens of examples of official national self-representation, or of what I am calling here "culture for export." These are the images by which states want their nations to be known, because they are the images by which tourists know those nations - and vice versa.
Inserting itself between the increasingly boundaryless tourist market and its own nation's potential touristic "product," the state in effect asserted a monopoly over the nation's cultural self-representation. In so doing it appropriated a model fashioned and developed in several different forms of writing and pictorial representation since the Romantic age, a model I will call the "autoethnographic" one. According to this model, the authority ascribed to a representation of a particular culture depends in large part upon a representation of the representer as an insider of that culture and spokesperson for that culture - though not necessarily in any simple or unproblematic fashion. Now, the idea of a collectivity that represents itself or that "speaks" constitutes, of course, one of the basic tropes of romantic nationalism, the conventional narrative of which holds that a people realizes its national potential when it asserts the ability to "tell its own story" or demands "permission to narrate." (The idea that the people capable of representing itself is free from the representations imposed upon it by others has received new life in the postcolonial era, for which collective self-representation is typically a militant, positive step in the overthrowing of ascribed by indigenous identities.) Considered in their autoethnographic aspect, State tourist boards complicate this narrative, for they manifestly arose from the perception, not that nations inherently longed for self-expression, but that nations could not afford not to represent themselves to the powers outside them. Images purporting to represent the culture of a whole nation or region are promulgated out of a mix of motives: deference to external or delocalized economic forces, defensiveness about the collective identity subjected to these forces, opportunistic marketing of national caricatures.
The kind of writing the autoethnographic pattern could sponsor would appear to be the very opposite of what we know as "travel writing" - accounts of a sojourn among aliens - but I contend that, conceived of perhaps as the dialectical partner to the more narrow and familiar variety, it belongs in an expanded conception of the writing of travel: writing created in consciousness of, in complicity with, in resistance to existing travel demands and expectations. Toward this expanded conception of the field I would like to trace the genealogy of "autoethnographic" or "export-culture" writing in the United Kingdom since the time of Walter Scott, Maria Edgeworth, Lady Morgan, and others of the early nineteenth century. These were authors self-consciously positioned in between metropolitan and peripheral cultures of the United Kingdom, who took it upon themselves to represent and speak for the peripheries to the metropolitan audience, with the paradoxical aim of cementing Union by emphasizing cultural difference (a forerunner of the more global aim of securing interntional peace by demarcating tourist-friendly regions of difference). To bring these figures into the discussion will mean expanding the territory of "the writing of travel" in another direction as well - the direction of genre - for these writers made the novel (and other genres) into a hospitable form for dramatizing autoethnography's appeal and complications, and to come to terms with them in this context will require that we move beyond the narrow idea of travel writing as a form of personal memoir. Drawing a line, say, from Scott to the Scottish Tourist Authority (a branch of the British Tourist Authority, itself under the aegis of the cabinet-level Department of the National Heritage) will also oblige us to consider that the parliamentary debates, the inter-office memos, and the official correspondence that surround the formation of national Tourist Boards or Ministries of Tourism are part of "the writing of travel," too. Working from Parliamentary records and from the Archives of the British Tourist Authority and its regional subsidiaries, I will reconstruct the process by which the British State got into the culture-for-export business, analyzing the representation of that process by its participants (from Lord Hacking's Travel Association [1929] to the Development of Tourism Act [1969]) in relation to the autoethnographic tropes and conventions of the Romantic era.
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