ABSTRACT
Dark tourism is an intimation of postmodernity because of memorialisation, commodification and industrialisation aspects, which accompany fascination with death as an explicit motivation to travel. Affective danger-zone tourism shows the socio-cultural, spatial and political productivity of affects, emotions and drives experienced and performed in areas of conflict. Geographies of affect and psychoanalysis are useful to examine tourists' embodied feelings, emotions and engagements with places and spaces of ongoing conflict. The death drive blurs the boundaries of the life-death dualism when touring 'dangerous destinations of the present', even though Sigmund Freud saw them as a sensible dichotomy that can explain 'the rich multiplicity of the phenomena of life'. The postmodern and post-structural approaches provide researchers with tools to problematise and subvert dichotomies. Postmodern and post-structural approaches contribute to understanding performances of danger-zone tourist subjectivities as emotional, affective and sensuous in ongoing socio-political conflict zones. Postmodernity and post-structuralism, if properly understood, struggle to 'free knowledge' from the shackles of dialectic dualism.
