ABSTRACT
As tourism has risen to the top of the global economy – and especially with the industry having become the darling of the World Bank and the IMF1 – tourism has worked its way into everyone’s imaginations and realities. While there is much to say about the rise of the development of tourism, it is these latter terms – imagination and reality – that I will be exploring in this chapter. By focusing on advertisements portraying and promoting tourism, I will consider the ways that visual rhetoric influences the ways that we imagine and consequently construct tourism realities. Using an Althusserian framework, I argue that the ways we learn to imagine ourselves and others vis-à-vis tourism has a profound and lasting impact on the ways that tourism is experienced by both tourists and locals. Likewise, these imaginings also have consequences for the very landscapes that tourists occupy. While this is true for all tourism everywhere, I argue that the impact of tourism is felt most forcefully in developing2 spaces. It is thus that the advertisements I consider portray Third World tourism specifically.
