ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by outlining a genealogy of tourism studies that have utilised a postcolonial perspective to analyse forms of privilege. It focuses on types on tourism devoted to representing subalterns, moved on to a conceptualisation of the pleasures and perils of aestheticising the slum and connected it to how the privilege of whiteness has been conceptualised in an Indian context. Whiteness thus functioned, and functions still, as an ideal that erases all other ideals and thereby becomes the ideal rather than an ideal. The possible moral problem of slum tourism and voluntourism, on the other hand, is that their focus on inequality still gives the former colonisers the relative upper hand and perhaps even reproduce the structures of inequality they sometimes attempt to dismantle. If so, then this playful abjection can be read as a version of Dovey and King's concept of sublimity presented earlier: a small amount of discomfort that makes visible the comforts otherwise taken for granted.
