ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the close relationship between international tourism and whiteness. Mattsson shows how whiteness plays a significant role as a silent norm that operates through a rhetorical silence in many tourist contexts in the transnational sphere. Through new critical whiteness studies perspectives, Mattsson sketches out the contours of an emerging research field that explicitly explores and theorises the importance of whiteness and race in contemporary tourism. The chapter shows how different ways of travelling and going on holiday entail different logics of whiteness and race formations, and how race and whiteness interacts with other social orders such as class, gender and sexuality in the tourist sphere. The chapter demonstrates how whiteness works as a structuring principle in contemporary tourism, but also that different logics of whiteness are prominent in different tourist segments. Theoretically, Mattsson frames the significance of whiteness in tourism as an underlying and integrated dimension of contemporary tourism, in order to explore different dimensions of the colonial continuity of tourism, particularly how colonial spaces, discourses and subjectivities are reproduced, modified and adapted to prevailing conditions in different tourist segments.
