This article examines certain kinds of travel and tourism as extensions of colonial and examples of neocolonial forms of Orientalist engagement between the global North and global South. Focusing on areas that border the Indian Ocean, and the South Asian context in particular, I interrogate the gendered, racial, and geopolitical attachments that have historically drawn and continue to draw travelers to the region for tourism. I refer to these attachments as cartographies of salvation. In connecting the history and representations of travel to the area to the forms of leisure and spiritual tourism popularized by the 2006 memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, I argue that the Indian Ocean region remains for many a paternalistic endeavor or an exotic playground, where one can project a sense of purpose or indulge in an escapist fantasy. This article combines critical tourism studies, feminist ethnography and theory, and critical race studies.
AdlerN. E.RehkopfD. H. (2008) “U.S. Disparities in Health: Descriptions, Causes, and Mechanisms,” Annual Review of Public Health29: 235–52.
2.
AggarwalA. K.GuglaniM.GoelR. K. (2008) “Spiritual and Yoga Tourism: A Case Study on Experience of Foreign Tourists Visiting Rishikesh, India,” in Conference on Tourism in India-Challenges Ahead, IIMK, Kozhikode, India, 15–17 May, pp. 459–64.
3.
AhmedS. (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
4.
AhmedS. (2010) The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
5.
AlexanderM. J.MohantyC. T. (2010) “Cartographies of Knowledge and Power: Transnational Feminism as Radical Praxis,” pp. 23–45 in NagarR.SwarrA. L. (eds) Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
6.
BandyopadhyayR. (2009) “The Perennial Western Tourism Representations of India That Refuse to Die,” Tourism57(1): 23–35.
7.
BandyopadhyayR.PatilV. (2017) “‘The White Woman’s Burden’-The Racialized, Gendered Politics of Volunteer Tourism,” Tourism Geographies19(4): 644–57.
8.
BandyopadhyayR.MoraisD. (2005) “Representative Dissonance,” Annals of Tourism Research32(4): 1006–21.
9.
BandyopadhyayR.MoraisD. B.ChickG. (2008) “Religion and Identity in India’s Heritage Tourism,” Annals of Tourism Research35(3): 790–808.
10.
BeamanL. G.SikkaS. (2018) Constructions of Self and Other in Yoga, Travel, and Tourism: A Journey to Elsewhere. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
BirdeeG. S.LegedzaA. T.SaperR. B., et al. (2008) “Characteristics of Yoga Users: Results of a National Survey,” Journal of General Internal Medicine23(10): 1653–58.
13.
BowersH.CheerJ. M. (2017) “Yoga Tourism: Commodification and Western Embracement of Eastern Spiritual Practice,” Tourism Management Perspectives24: 208–16.
CarveyW. (1934 [1792]) An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens. London: Baptist Missionary Society.
16.
ChandraS. (2014) “‘India Will Change You Forever’: Hinduism, Islam, and Whiteness in the American Empire,” Signs40(2): 487–512.
17.
ChaudharyZ. R. (2012) Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-century India. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
18.
ChettyR.StepnerM.AbrahamS., et al. (2016) “The Association between Income and Life Expectancy in the United States, 2001–2014,” Journal of the American Medical Association315(16): 1750–66.
ConranM. (2011) “They Really Love Me! Intimacy in Volunteer Tourism,” Annals of Tourism Research38(4): 1454–73.
21.
DhawanN. (2014) Decolonizing Enlightenment Transnational Justice, Human Rights and Democracy in a Postcolonial World. Leverkusen-Opladen: Budrich, Barbara.
22.
DyerR. (1997) White. New York: Routledge.
23.
FeaginJ. R. (2009) The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-Framing. New York: Routledge.
24.
FoxenA. P. (2017) Biography of a Yogi: Paramahansa Yogananda and the Origins of Modern Yoga. New York: Oxford University Press.
25.
GurselZ. D. (2016) Image Brokers: Visualizing World News in the Age of Digital Circulation. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
26.
HallD. (1994) “New Age Music: A Voice of Liminality in Postmodern Popular Culture,” Popular Music and Society18(2): 13–21.
27.
HallaqW. B. (2018) Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge. New York: Columbia University Press.
28.
HughesS. P.StevensonE. (2018) “Postcard Journeys: Image, Text, Media,” in Conference Organized by the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 14 September.
29.
JainA. R. (2015) Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.
30.
JohnstonA. (2003) Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860. New York: Cambridge University Press.
31.
KaurR. (2020) Brand New Nation: Capitalist Dreams and Nationalist Designs in Twenty-First-Century India. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
32.
KerriganF.ShivanandanJ.HedeA.-M. (2012) “Nation Branding: A Critical Appraisal of Incredible India,” Journal of Macromarketing32(3): 319–27.
33.
LauL.MendesA. C. (2014) Re-orientalism and South Asian Identity Politics: The Oriental Other Within. New York: Routledge.
34.
LouiseS. (2016) “The Globalization of the Gayatri Mantra,” in Lecture Presented at the Third Annual Race and Yoga Conference, Berkeley, CA, 26 April.
35.
NdalikoC. R. (2016) Necessary Noise: Music, Film, and Charitable Imperialism in the East of Congo. New York: Oxford University Press.
36.
PainterN. I. (2010) The History of White People. New York: W.W. Norton.
37.
ParkC. L.BraunT.SiegelT. (2015) “Who Practices Yoga? A Systematic Review of Demographic, Health-Related, and Psychosocial Factors Associated with Yoga Practice,” Journal of Behavioral Medicine38(3): 460–71.
38.
PrasadP. (2015) “Paradiso Lost: Writing Memory and Nostalgia in the Ethnographic Present,” Text and Performance Quarterly35(2–3): 202–20.
39.
PrashadV. (2007) The Karma of Brown Folk. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
40.
PuarJ. K. (2017) The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
41.
RosaldoR. (1989) “Imperialist Nostalgia,” Memory and Counter-Memory: Representations26: 107–22.
42.
SenguptaM. (2009) “Making the State Change Its Mind—The IMF, the World Bank and the Politics of India’s Market Reforms,” New Political Economy14(2): 181–210.
43.
Seshadri-CrooksK. (2000) Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race. Abingdon: Taylor & Francis.
44.
SinghM. C. (2013) Gender, Religion, and “Heathen Lands”: American Missionary Women in South Asia (1860S-1940s). New York: Routledge.
45.
SinghR. (2020) “A Critical Yoga Studies Analysis of Race, Othering and Belonging,”Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture (forthcoming).
46.
SingletonM. (2010) Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice. New York: Oxford University Press.
47.
SkwiotC. (2012) The Purposes of Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Cuba and Hawai’i. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
48.
SperoJ. E.HartJ. A. (2010) The Politics of International Economic Relations. Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
49.
TchenJ. K. W. (2001) New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776–1882. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
50.
VeraY. (1999) Thatha Camera: The Pursuit for Reality. Bulawayo, Zimbabwe: National Gallery of Zimbabwe. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title, organized by and presented at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe.
51.
VivancoL. A.GordonR. J. (2006) Tarzan Was an Eco-tourist__: And Other Tales in the Anthropology of Adventure. New York: Berghahn Books.
52.
WilliamsR. (2014) “Eat, Pray, Love: Producing the Female Neoliberal Spiritual Subject Eat, Pray, Love,” The Journal of Popular Culture47(3): 613–33.
