Dreaming Forward: Postidentity and the Generative Thresholds of Tourism

Abstract

This manuscript from Hollinshead and Vellah calls for researchers in Tourism Studies and related Fields to reflect upon their own role in refreshing the social imaginaries of "after-colonialism" under the nomadisms of our time. Deleuzian in outlook, it positions the “post” of postcolonialism not as an end to colonialism's imperatives but as a generative-portal through which new-seeds-of-"becoming"are discernable as the postidentities (rather than the “identities”) of populations are interpretable in multidirectional, non-hierarchical, and not easily-predictable ways. In provoking (after Deleuze) thought per rhizomatic processes (rather than via fixed concepts), the manuscript - critiquing these dynamic matters of “postidentity” - then harnesses the insights of (Leela) Ghandi’s on hybrid-nomadic-subjects, and of Venn on alternative-(com)possible-futures. Thereafter, these concerns of and about “after-colonialism” are critically contextualised within Aboriginal “Australia”, via the views of a pool of Indigenous intellectuals there, who synthesise the disruptive dialectics of belonging-cum-aspiration which they maintain that they and fellow Aboriginal people (of many sorts) face today. Throughout this manuscript, the agency and authority of tourism hovers in its sometimes-manifest / sometimes-latent generative power to project empowering postidentities for the world’s “host” or “visited” populations today.