ABSTRACT
This chapter uses a case study of New Orleans to examine how global forces and local organizations facilitate the growth of ethnic heritage tourism. Recent years have seen the growth of a broad literature on the role of tourism in promoting the cultural exoticism of local peoples the world over (Desmond 1999; Meethan 2001; Urry 1995: 163-70, 2002). ‘Ethnic heritage tourism’ refers to the varieties of leisure and travel that involve the commodification of ethnic goods and cultural activities and the staging of ethnic rituals and customs for tourist consumption (Chang et al. 1996). In this conception, tourism interests rework and modify representations of ethnicity and culture to make them appealing to visitors. Parallelling this process of representation is the attempt by metropolitan elites to create ethnic tourist districts such as Chinatowns (Lin 1998), to redevelop urban ethnic neighbourhoods (Boyd 2000; Hoffman 2003) and to persuade immigrants to migrate to their cities to help build a multiethnic populace and cosmopolitan culture. Many scholars have analysed efforts by tourism professionals to employ selected cultural symbols and motifs to stimulate travel to various cities and facilitate the building of tourism venues (for overviews, see Alsayyad 2001; Fainstein and Judd 1999; Hannigan 1998; Judd 2003; Kearns and Philo 1993). Yet urban scholarship on tourism still lacks specificity in analysing how, and under what conditions, tourism is a force for globalizing ethnicity (by delocalizing it and disembedding it from place, for example) as well as a force for producing and reinforcing ethnic distinctiveness in place.
