Staging Visitation: Tourist Performances and Theatricalized Places

Staging Visitation frames tourism and travel as complex social performances that shape identities, communities, and global imaginaries. This volume proposes “visitation” as a framework that emphasizes the participatory and relational dimensions of travel. While tourism is often pejoratively framed as a commodified or exploitative leisure activity for those with means, its reality is far more nuanced. Tourism stages heritage, provokes encounters across cultural divides, and prompts both visitors and hosts to negotiate values and identities—all while sustaining economies (and the power relations they produce) at global and local scales. From museums and theme parks to festivals and influencer culture, the essays in this volume trace how transitory encounters—embodied, affective, and historically layered—build travel destinations into theatricalized places. These essays bring theater and performance studies into conversation with cultural geography, sociology, anthropology, and media studies to demonstrate how tourism functions as both a stage and a repertoire for modern life. Staging Visitation argues that travel is not only about movement across space, but also about the performance of culture itself—its preservation, reinvention, and transformation.