The Unfortunate Inner Lives of Scholars of Color in Leisure and Tourism Studies

Abstract

In this conceptual paper, I tried to articulate that in leisure and tourism studies “we still live in a wholly racialized world” (Morrison, 1992). Few leisure and tourism scholars cared to follow the clues to map the contours of the racial predicament of scholars of color as a way of their lives surviving in the academia. As a scholar of color, my everlasting quest has always been to feel at home without becoming “White”. The dilemmas and rejections in this journey created an omnipresent tension in my life which shaped the content of this paper. I understand that this study will certainly not set the Thames on fire but I seek to open new avenues of discussion to break this silence. While doing that, I tried to follow the philosophy of Hegel’s “master/slave dialectic: the search for self-consciousness” within the Bakhtinian (multiaccentuality of racial meaning) and Levinasian (his close equivalence between structuralist anthropology and genetics) context equipped with the wisdom of Stuart Hall, Frantz Fanon, W.E.B. Du Bois, Toni Morrison, Michel Foucault, Karl Marx, Jacques Derrida and Amartya Sen.