Abstract:
Re-appropriating colonial attractions for tourist gaze has generally been a lucrative
commercial practice in post-independent nations. When they are revitalized with the
state sponsorship, these signifiers can also function to resuscitate the memories of
centuries-old imperial oppression, exploitation and alienation in the respective subject
nations. Apart from catering to the historical nostalgia of the European tourists, they,
at the same time, permanently alienate the locals in their own cultural environment
who still struggle with the traumatic memories and discourses of colonialism. In
relation to the historical unconscious of the postcolonial subjects whose present is
retroactively structured by the traumas of a disturbed past, despite the immediate
commercial success in tourism, it can be argued, in line with Homi K. Bhabha’s
decolonization paradigm, that these archeological artifacts ‘intercut with’ the
postcolonial identity by further alienating the postcolonial subjects within their own
setting. In this light, this essay views that the rise of postcolonial exotic tourism that
caters to the European fantasmatic gaze still depends on the ‘Western idea about the
Orient’. Further, on the subjectivization and depersonalization of once colonized
subjects, in the present postcolonial context, this paper suggests that the postcolonial
tourism should re-interrogate the initial Fanonian question, ‘what do the European
tourists want?’ It, therefore, concludes that as long as the postcolonial nations believe
in the European fantasmatic they will be caught in the deadlock of master-slave
fantasy-desire of the European Other rather than journeying for a new ‘mastery’ over
their former White Masters.
