Alienation within Alienation: European Fantasmatic, Tourist Gaze and the Logic of Colonial Tourism in Postcolonial Sri Lanka

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.