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Major: CSRE
Thesis Title: ˇViva Turismo!: Overcoming Racial Borders through a Trans-American, Transnational Social Movement of Travel, Art, Language, Community Organizing, and Youth Activism
Thesis Abstract
Despite many claims that the United States has become a “post-race, color-blind” society, this thesis illustrates on the contrary, how socially vacant mass tourist practices are helping perpetuate a new racism, which manifests itself abroad in passive entrenchments of class, national, and ethnic divisions. Nonetheless, as one of today's most intimate and globalizing forces, tourism may in fact possess the potential for a transnational anti-racist project in which institutionalized class, ethnic, and national barriers may be collectively challenged and reformulated to represent a more progressive and international racial polity. By analyzing acts of travel employed in prominent political, ideological, and artistic movements, travel's symbolic and transformative power is shown to be a key strategic tool (alongside art, shared intercultural communication, youth activism, and community organizing) to both unite individuals and create physical embodiments – potent and portentous – which demonstrate the breaking down of racial divides. Finally, viewing popular forms of anti-social mass tourism to Mexico and Latin America as symptomatic of our nation's tendencies towards isolationist civic dialogue and neoliberal economic policies, I analyze the revolutionary endeavors of current artistic figures and projects which are currently attempting to break down international divisions of race, by modeling for us a more engaged and socially responsible form of travel.
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Copyright ©2009, Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity
Copyright ©2009, Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity