Remembrancing, remembrance gangs and co-opted encounters

Abstract

This chapter offers a critical perspective on the dark tourism experience as a generic tourism form. It starts with 12 mini-case scenarios of dark tourism, showcasing its existential variety internationally, and the difficulties of locating the variations within accepted generic tourism criteria, the two main absences being: – homogeneity of product experience, and of a distinctive and identifiable visitor group, committed to “dark experiences.” The chapter revisits the belief that “encounters with death” constitute the core experience, rejecting it as a metaphorical reification, since death is always unknowable absence, not presence. Instead, it is proposed that the encounters at dark tourism sites are, in reality, with embodied remembrance, engineered and manufactured by remembrancers in ways that become the “sights” at memorial sites. Remembrance, it is argued, is a construct that may be understood and engineered in at least three different ways, one or more of which is always inscribed in dark tourism experience. The revised perspective reveals an undervalued truth about “dark” encounters, which is that they are as much about the living – whether individuals, governments or corporations, who choose, engineer and orchestrate memorial forms – as the dead. The chapter concludes with recent instances showing how remembrance choices, shifts and controversies dynamically affect, and are affected by, dark tourism, making it increasingly part of what is now known as “the politics of commemoration”, a zeitgeist issue of our times.