'Dark Tourism' in Comparative Perspective: Sites of Suffering, Sites of Memory

This project explores, in comparative perspective, the relationship between memory, place, cultural heritage, colonialism and public understandings of suffering and imprisonment. Although former places of suffering and detention have recently been developed into museums, hotels, memorials, conference centres and other commercial or heritage buildings across the world, there has been very little academic research which focuses on the public reception of these buildings; the part they play in memorialising and interpreting 'difficult' pasts; or their commercial and economic importance to the heritage and museum industry. The research offers a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach to the field of dark tourism, challenging any previous perception of the field's Anglophone biases. It focuses in particular on former sites of suffering, incarceration and genocide, and explores the increasing engagement with these locations by the heritage industry. The research will draw on a broad range of disciplinary expertise - history, sociology, anthropology, comparative cultural studies, museum studies - in France and the UK to interrogate existing assumptions and methodologies in studies of 'dark tourism', to challenge the alinguistic tendencies of previous approaches, and to generate new comparative and cross-cultural insights. The project will, through an initial review of existing literature, seek to establish a common framework of meaning which captures the similarities but also the distinctiveness of the evolution of theory around 'dark tourism' in France and the UK. It will then develop two specific strands of activity relating to: (i) cultures of penal and convict incarceration in France, the UK, Tasmania, and New Caledonia, and (ii) recent museums and memorials relating to the Holocaust and the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda. This approach will permit analyses of the intersections of dark tourism and heritage in a range of Anglophone and Francophone contexts, and will allow a focus - in a workshop and conference, as well as in a range of publications for academic and professional audiences - on the possibilities in the field of comparative methodologies and transnational understandings.