ABSTRACT
This chapter examines narratives of echotourism that move beyond tropes of aura, ritual, and depth. It begins by drawing on the figure of the post-tourist to characterize echotourist narratives that see fresh possibilities in inauthenticity and play. In Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before (2002), Tony Horwitz travels to follow the social circulation of Cook’s legacy through different local cultures. Unlike most echotourists, whose re-enactments are solitary, Horwitz participates in public, group re-enactments of Cook’s various landings. He also engages in deliberately ridiculous re-enactments that critique Cook’s legacy. A similar spirit of educated irreverence characterizes pop star Gruff Rhys’ American Interior (2014), in which he re-enacts the travels of eighteenth-century Welsh explorer John Evans through the U.S. Rhys foregrounds an absurdist dimension to his journey by travelling with a large felt doll of Evans. He has a rhizomatic understanding of the past and toggles between multiple interpretations of Evans. Horwitz and Rhys present alternatives to the modernist structures of meaning that characterize much echotourist writing and gesture towards its postmodern possibilities.
