The Production and Consumption of Cultural Villages in South Africa: A Decolonial Epistemic Perspective
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25159/0304-615X/2301Keywords:
cultural villages, representation, tourism, neo-colonialism, postcolonial, de-colonial, capitalism, discourse, powerAbstract
While many of the peoples who exist in the 'spatio-temporal' construct known as the postcolonial world today are convinced that they have succeeded - through anticolonial and anti-imperial struggles - to defeat colonial domination, the majority of the people of the same part of the world have not yet reaped the freedoms which they aimed to achieve. The question that emerges out of the failure to realise the objectives of anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggles by the people of the Third World after a number of years of absence of juridical-administrative colonial and apartheid systems is to what extent did the people who sought to dethrone colonial domination understand the complexity of the colonial system? And to what end did the ability and/or inability to master the complexity of the colonial system affect the process of decolonization? Through the case study of the production and consumption of cultural villages in South Africa, this article deploys a de-colonial epistemic perspective to reveal, within the context of tourism studies, the complexity of the colonial system and why a truly decolonized postcolonial world has so far eluded the people of the developing world.
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Britton, S. 1989. ‘Tourism, Dependency and Development’. Tn T. Theuns and F.M.G. (eds.), Towards
Appropriate Tourism: The case of Developing Countries. New York: Peter Lang.
Britton, S. 1982. The Political Economy of Tourism in the Third World. Annals of Tourism Research 9:
331–358.
Cameron, C.M. 1997. ‘Dilemmas of the Crossover Experience: Tourism Work in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania’.
In E. Chambers (ed.), Tourism and Culture: An Applied Perspective. Albany: State University of New
York Press.
Coombes, A.E. 1994. Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination In the Late
Victorian and Edwardian England. Yale: Yale University Press.
Crang, M. 1999. ‘Nation, Region and Homeland: History and Tradition in Dalamarna, Sweden’. Cultural
Geographies 6(4): 447–470.
Dascal, M. 2009. Colonizing and Decolonizing Minds. In I. Kucurandi (ed.), Papers of 2007 World
Philosophy Day. Ankara: Philosophical Society of Turkey.
De la Harpe, R., De la Harpe, P.M., Leitch B. and Derwe, S. 1999. Zulu. Cape Town: Struik.
De Sousa Santos, B. 2007. ‘Beyond Abyssal Thinking’. Eurozine.
Edensor, T. 2001. ‘Performing Tourism, Staging Tourism: (Re)Producing Tourist Space and Practice’.
Tourist Studies 1(10): 59–81.
Errington, S. 1998. The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Ferguson, J. (1990). The Anti-Politics Machine: “Developmentâ€, depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power
in Lesotho. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Foucault, M. 1976. ‘The Eye of Power’. In C. Gordon (ed.), Power/ Knowledge: Selected Interviews and
Other Writings. Brighton: Harvester.
Foucault, M. 1980. Power/Knowledge. Brighton: Harvester.
Francisco, R. 1983. ‘The Political Impact of Tourism Dependence in Latin America’. Annals of Tourism
Research 10: 363–376.
Galaty, J.G 2002. ‘How Visual Figures Speak: Narrative Inventions of “The Pastoralist†in East Africa’.
Visual Anthropology 15(3 and 4): 347–368.
Gordon, L.R. 2011. Shifting the Geography in an Age of Disciplinary Decadence. Transmodernity: Journal
of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1(2): 95–103.
Gordon, R.J. 2002. Captured on Film: Bushmen and the Claptrap of Performative Primitives, In P.S. Landau
and D.S. Kaspin, Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa. California:
California University Press.
Grosfoguel, R. 2007. The Epistemic De-colonial Turn. Cultural Studies 21 (2–3): 211–223.
Harding, S. 1991. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Hitchcock, M. 1998. ‘Tourism, “Taman Mini†and National Identity’. Indonesia and the Malay World
26(75): 124–135.
Hollinshead, K. 1999a. ‘Surveillance of the Worlds of tourism: Foucault and the Eye-of-Power’. Tourism
Management 20: 7–23.
Jeal, T. 1973. Livingstone. London: Heinemann.
Kasfir, S.L. 2002. ‘Slum-Dunking and the Last Noble Savage’. Visual Anthropology 15: 396– 85.
Kratz, C.A & Gordon, R.J. 2002. ‘Persistent Images of Pastoralists’. Visual Anthropology 15: 247–265.
Landau, P.S. & Kaspin. D.S. (eds.). 2002. Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial
Africa. California: California University Press.
Lindfors, B. (ed.). 1999. Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Maldonado-Torres, N. 2007. ‘On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept’.
Cultural Studies 21(2–3): 240–270.
Marschall, S. 2003. ‘Mind the Difference: A Comparative Analysis of Zulu Cultural Villages in KwaZulu-
Natal’. Southern African Humanities 15: 109–27.
Mhiripiri, N.A. 2008. The Tourist Viewer, the Bushmen and the Zulu: Imagining and (Re)Invention of
Identities Through Contemporary Visual Cultural Production. Unpublished PhD thesis.
Mignolo, W.D. 2009. Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and De-colonial Freedom. Theory,
Culture & Society 26(7–8): 159–181.
Milne, S. 1998. Tourism and Sustainable Development: Exploring the Global-Local Nexus. In C. Hall and
A. Lew (eds.), Sustainable Tourism: A Geographical Perspective. New York: Longman.
Mohany, S. 1993. ‘The Epistemic Status of Cultural Identity: On “Beloved†and the Postcolonial Condition’.
Cultural Critique 24: 41–80.
Mowforth, M. and Munt, I. 1998. Tourism and Sustainability: New Tourism in the Third World. London:
Routledge.
Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S.J. 2007. ‘Rethinking the Colonial Encounter in Zimbabwe in the Early Twentieth
Century’. Journal of Southern African Studies 33(1): 173–191.
Sahlins, M. 1985. Islands of History. London: The University of Chicago Press.
Oakes, T. (1995). Tourism in Guizoh: Place and the Paradox of Modernity. Unpublished PhD dissertation,
University of Washington.
Pieterse, J.N. (1992). White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture. New
Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Place, S. 1995. ‘Ecotourism for Sustainable Development: Oxymoron or Plausible Strategy?’. Geojournal
35: 161–174.
Quijano, A. 2000. Coloniality of Power, Ethnocentrism, and Latin America. NEPANTLA 1.
Shaw, G. and Williams, A. 1998. ‘Entrepreneurship, Small Business Culture and Tourism Development’.
In D. Ioannides and K. Debbage (eds.), The Economic Geography of The Tourist Industry. A Supplyside
Analysis. London: Routledge.
Tomaselli, K.G. (ed.). 2007a. Writing in the San/d: Autoethnography Amongst Indigenous Southern
Africans. New York: Altamira Press.
Tomaselli, K.G. & Wang, C. 2001. ‘Selling Myths, Not Culture: Authenticity and Cultural Tourism’.
Tourism Forum Southern Africa 1(1): 23–33.
Jansen Van Veuren, E. 2003. ‘Capitalising on Indigenous Cultures: Cultural Village Tourism in South
Africa’. Africa Insight 33(1-2).
Xie, P. 2011. Authenticating Ethnic Tourism. Bristol: Channel View Publications.
Zeleza, P.T. 2006a. ‘The Inventions of African Identities and Languages: The Discursive and Developmental
Implications’. In O.F. Arasanyin and M.A. Pemberton (eds.). Selected Proceedings of the 36th Annual
Conference on African Linguistics: Shifting The Centre of Africanism in Languages and Economic
Globalisation. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
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Published
2017-03-10
How to Cite
Ndlovu, Morgan. 2017. “The Production and Consumption of Cultural Villages in South Africa: A Decolonial Epistemic Perspective”. Africanus: Journal of Development Studies 43 (2):51-63. https://doi.org/10.25159/0304-615X/2301.
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