ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the seemingly unproblematic signification at work in and through tourism promotional videos. The analysis and discussion employ a discourse studies approach, which focuses on state sponsored tourism promotional videos for few countries. The 'post-oil' era has witnessed the development of modern institutions, which are often involved in production, reproduction or representation of national and regional myths of origin. As Exell and Rico note, 'The nation-states of Arabian Peninsula are now becoming openly and aggressively involved in preservation, representation and invention of their own individual and distinct tangible national culture and heritage'. Part of that response has grown out of the roots of Frankfurt project of 'critical theory' and the emergence of Critical Linguistics (CL) and subsequent development of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Therefore, tourism promotional films such as the corps explored in this chapter can be interpreted as pedagogic texts, narrating a vision of concerned states as anchored in prehistory and extending into modernity/postmodernity.
