Period Theme Parks, Tourism, and Postmodernism

Abstract

Over the last decades, Renaissance themed-festivals have become a popular tourism attraction in the U.S. This paper attempts to interpret the meaning of Renaissance Festival as a tourism product in reference to contemporary sociocultural characteristics and function of ‘culture industry’. Postmodern conditions that characterize the contemporary consumer society are diagnosed as apathy, superficiality, and emotional detachment. Nostalgia is proposed as a way to deal with the postmodern social conditions that permeate through every facet of human relationships. Renaissance themed-festival, as a combined outcome of contemporaries’ nostalgic mental states, and reconstructed past by culture industry, was interpreted as the collective sharing of simulacra that have finally become an inescapable trap of consumer society.