Tourist or native? Consequences of tourism on the literary, filmic, and critical practices of Newfoundland

Resumen

This paper examines an attitude that nurtures artistic manifestations and literary criticism in Newfoundland, Canada: the acute awareness that their identity as a cultural community is now being consumed through global touristic discourses which somehow replace past stereotypical depictions of Newfoundlanders on the part of Canadian mainlanders. A number of economic and cultural disasters loom large in the imaginary of Newfoundland. Among them, the loss of nationhood in 1949, the resettlement of the outport communities in the 1950s and 1970s, the extinction of the fish in 1992, and high rates of out-migration. These losses have shaken a society that has had to redefine traditional notions of survival and dignity. Although tourism has been a convenient economic way out for the island, it has activated a conspicuous alertness for the dangers of the commodification of place and people as soothing products for tourists. Criticism by John Urry [(1995). Consuming places. London: Routledge; (2004). Death in Venice. In M. Sheller & J. Urry (Eds.), Tourism mobilities. Places to play, places in play (pp. 205-216). London: Routledge], James Overton [(1996). Making a world of difference: Essays on tourism, culture and development in Newfoundland. St. John's: ISER], Alan Blum [(2003). The imaginative structure of the city. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press], Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt et al. [(2004). Performing tourist places. Cornwall: Ashgate], Herb Wyile [(2011). Anne of Tim Hortons: Globalization and the reshaping of Atlantic-Canadian literature. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press], and Cassie M. Hays [(2012). Placing nature(s) on safari. Tourist Studies, 12(3), 250-267] will inform my study on how place is created by touristic consumption; I will examine some figurations which brand Newfoundland as a therapeutic space with a view to elucidating how an awareness of Newfoundland's touristic stance as a quaint place is both dramatized and resisted in some of the literary criticism, the fiction, the cinema, and the poetry produced in the province. © 2014 © 2014 Taylor & Francis.