Citation

Dürr E, Jaffe R, Jones GA. Space Cult. 2020; 23(1): 4-14.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/1206331219865684

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This article explores how so-called "slum" tourism commodifies poverty and violence, transforming urban deprivation into a tourism product. In particular, we pay ethnographic attention to the role of brokers who mediate encounters between residents and tourists. The article explores how brokers--tour guides, art curators and civil society organizations--work to mediate power structures and enact a specific representational-performative politics. In so doing, brokers play a key role in aestheticizing and performing poverty and violence and converting disadvantaged spaces into a tourist product. We argue that brokers are vital to the reproduction of existing inequalities and to the formation of new social relationships and subjectivities.

Language: en