White Privileged Tourists in Exotic Lands and the Spectacle of Cultural Difference

Description

Presentation at the annual NECS Conference

This paper draws on my latest research project (www.exotic-cinema.org) and award-winning book Exotic Cinema: Encounters with Cultural Difference in Contemporary Transnational Film (2024), which interrogates regimes of visuality, such as the imperial, the ethnographic and the exotic gaze, which have colonised our minds and our ways of looking and which continue to shape our encounters with cultural difference on contemporary screens.

I will compare mainstream Eurocentric tourist films about white privileged tourists in the Global South, including Hector and the Search for Happiness (Peter Chelsom, 2014), The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and its sequel (John Madden, 2011, 2015), with the thematically related Indian arthouse film Hotel Salvation (Shubhashish Bhutiani, 2016), about an old Hindu widower, who travels to the holy city of Varanasi to die. All four films revolve around the utopian promise associated with exotic travel, be it the promise of happiness, rejuvenation or salvation. The films’ utopianism is, in no small measure, evoked by the seductive allure of the exotic gaze, characterised by visual opulence and chromatic overindulgence.

On the one hand, exoticism’s highly aestheticised visual style contributes to the transnational appeal of these tourist films, but on the other hand, explains why they are widely regarded as ‘non-pc’. Exoticism is a highly contested mode of cultural representation that spectacularises cultural difference. The exotic gaze, like its close relative, the tourist gaze, is alleged to substitute a deep engagement with cultural difference with seductive surfaces, offering pleasure instead of prompting critical interrogation. In so doing, exotic spectacle potentially obscures disparities of power, white privilege and other uncomfortable truths. While the Eurocentric travelogues discussed in this paper deftly illustrate these ideological contestations, Hotel Salvation’s self-reflexive and ironic engagement with the exotic and the tourist gaze, mounts a critique of these scopic regimes.

Period	18 Jun 2025 → 21 Jun 2025
Held at	NECS
Degree of Recognition	International