Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Imagining Alexandria: Sightseeing in a City of the Mind

Imagining Alexandria: Sightseeing in a City of the Mind If Alexandria is familiar in the West it is largely as the fictional city of Durrell and others, a city with a glorious ancient past which had been subsumed into a more recent cosmopolitan decadence. Yet it lacks the visual signifiers of either its Hellenistic splendour or its early 20th century allure, and exists in contemporary guide books as a place without touristic sights where the well read traveller is exhorted to ‘use the mind’s eye' to bring it alive. Its associations, however, are those of high rather than popular culture, and its literary construction is as a bastion of Western colonialism and nostalgia, one which hegemonically defines an oriental Other as a liminal place of transgressive erotic possibility and schadenfreude. This Alexandrian myth exists uneasily within postcolonial Egypt, and equally uneasily with contemporary touristic practices that are both democratised and posited as much on material as on cultural consumption. This paper draws on MacCannell's semiotic of the tourist attraction to suggest that whatever the significance of past literary productions of high culture to contemporary tourists, they continue to be cited generically to validate and authenticate touristic responses to, and encounters with, a city lacking familiar and regularly reproduced sights. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change Taylor & Francis

Imagining Alexandria: Sightseeing in a City of the Mind

Dunn, David
Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change , Volume 4 (2): 20 – Sep 1, 2006
Download PDF
20 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/taylor-francis/imagining-alexandria-sightseeing-in-a-city-of-the-mind-GT8Pg8A4Rt

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Copyright
Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN
1747-7654
eISSN
1476-6825
DOI
10.2167/jtcc067.0
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

If Alexandria is familiar in the West it is largely as the fictional city of Durrell and others, a city with a glorious ancient past which had been subsumed into a more recent cosmopolitan decadence. Yet it lacks the visual signifiers of either its Hellenistic splendour or its early 20th century allure, and exists in contemporary guide books as a place without touristic sights where the well read traveller is exhorted to ‘use the mind’s eye' to bring it alive. Its associations, however, are those of high rather than popular culture, and its literary construction is as a bastion of Western colonialism and nostalgia, one which hegemonically defines an oriental Other as a liminal place of transgressive erotic possibility and schadenfreude. This Alexandrian myth exists uneasily within postcolonial Egypt, and equally uneasily with contemporary touristic practices that are both democratised and posited as much on material as on cultural consumption. This paper draws on MacCannell's semiotic of the tourist attraction to suggest that whatever the significance of past literary productions of high culture to contemporary tourists, they continue to be cited generically to validate and authenticate touristic responses to, and encounters with, a city lacking familiar and regularly reproduced sights.

Journal

Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change – Taylor & Francis

Published: Sep 1, 2006

Keywords: literary destination; mythical city; orientalist; postcolonial; sightseeing; tourist attraction

There are no references for this article.