Safe Distance, Dark Tourism, and Ambivalent Spatial Relation in Gillian Plowman’s Yours Abundantly, From Zimbabwe, and Christine Evans’s Trojan Barbie

Abstract

AbstractColonial adventures and imperialistic travels have taken a new pattern as in the cases of humanitarian travel and dark tourism in the twenty-first century. Dark tourism not only satisfies Western individual’s hunger for orientalism labeling the touristic site a marginal and exotic landscape, but also uncovers the touristic undercurrents involved in the voyage. In this article, by utilizing the immediacy of the theatre genre, I argue that dramatic literature shares similar ambivalent spatial relations with humanitarian travel in that they both locate themselves between proximity and remoteness in their relation to the other. Similarly, by staging metatheatrical aspects, Plowman’s