ABSTRACT
In this chapter I want to look at three interwoven mobilisations around travel and tourism. Perhaps the most obvious is the mobilisation of the destination, where I want to suggest that while tourism is often defined as travelling to somewhere – that sense of where is visited is actually rather less firmly placed on the earth’s surface than is often assumed. Second, I want to track the mobilisation of becoming a tourist, looking at the construction of tourism as a specific form and practice of mobility, which is perhaps a constrained and less free roving sense of motion than the term mobility often conjures up. And to tell those stories I want in a third register to tell the story of academic mobility – of being a researcher chasing the two previous mobilised topics. To be clear then, the location I am going to discuss is the Greek Ionian Island of Kefalonia, or to locate the destination in not entirely the same space, Captain Corelli’s Island. I am going to look at tourists travelling to that island, whichever one it may have been. The chapter is based on field work mostly in 2004, when I was collaborating with a colleague Penny Travlou, some two years after the release of the movie and a good eight years after the success of the novel of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (de Bernières 1994).
