Tourism imaginaries and the selective perception of visitors: Postcolonial heritage in Con Dao Islands, Vietnam

Abstract

Identifying the reasons why people visit places associated with death and suffering remains a key stake of dark tourism research. Such research, however, remains largely framed by Anglo-American perspectives and assumes visitors largely hail from the West. Less is known about the motivations of dark tourists from developing countries. This paper contributes to the debate by examining the case of tourism in Con Dao Archipelago, Vietnam. Once labeled as a ‘Hell on Earth’, the island is a famous site of both postcolonial and natural heritage, displaying former colonial prisons, prisoners’ cemeteries and memorials. Over the past five years, pilgrimage tours to the tomb of Co Sau, a national hero, in Hang Duong cemetery have increasingly attracted visitors from the Vietnamese mainland. Focusing on both the supply and demand sides of dark tourism, the research uses the theoretical lens of tourism imaginaries and visitors’ selective perception to investigate what attracted people to these tours. Document analysis, ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews with key informants show that a complicated set of factors (tourism commodification, geographic location, culture and beliefs) intersect to influence the emergence and transformation of penal sites’ imaginaries in Con Dao Islands. Despite being presented with three different imaginaries of Con Dao, visitors from Vietnam are engaged in a form of ‘spiritual tourism’ focused on the sacred element of the martyrs’ deaths and suffering, making this their main reason for visiting the island. The popularity of spiritual tours in Con Dao thus underlines the importance of looking at the islands’ heritages beyond Western conceptions of dark and resort tourism.