ABSTRACT
This chapter is about the links between exoticism and tourism, and the part both discourses play in the production, representation and exploitation of the cultural other. The exoticist discourse of cultural otherness, and the expansionist imperatives that discourse sanctions, have been crucial to the development of the modern tourist industry. Tourism, in the early twenty-first century, is the world’s largest and fastest growing industry, generating revenue in excess of 10 per cent of the global economy (MacCannell 1989). The expansion of the tourist industry has brought with it numerous socioeconomic problems; as Dean MacCannell points out in his seminal study The Tourist (1976, rev. edn 1989),
Tourism has developed at a rate faster than have its support institutions. For the last several years, in the month of August, there are several days during which every resort in the temperate climates in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas is filled in advance-the whole world is booked solid.
