HARTMANN, LENNON Et All - The History of Dark Tourism

Journal of Tourism History
ISSN: 1755-182X (Print) 1755-1838 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjth20
The history of dark tourism
Rudi Hartmann, John Lennon, Daniel P. Reynolds, Alan Rice, Adam T.

Rosenbaum & Philip R. Stone
To cite this article: Rudi Hartmann, John Lennon, Daniel P. Reynolds, Alan Rice, Adam T.
Rosenbaum & Philip R. Stone (2018) The history of dark tourism, Journal of Tourism History, 10:3,
269-295, DOI: 10.1080/1755182X.2018.1545394
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JOURNAL OF TOURISM HISTORY
2018, VOL. 10, NO. 3, 269–295
https://doi.org/10.1080/1755182X.2018.1545394
DISCUSSION
The history of dark tourism

Rudi Hartmanna, John Lennonb, Daniel P. Reynoldsc, Alan Riced, Adam T. Rosenbaume
and Philip R. Stonef
a
Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado Denver, Denver, CO, USA;
b
Moffat Centre for Travel and Tourism Business Development, Glasgow Caledonian University, Glasgow, UK;
c
German Department, Grinnell College, Grinnell, IA, USA; dSchool of Humanities and Social Sciences,
University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK; eDepartment of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Colorado Mesa
University, Grand Junction, CO, USA; fInstitute for Dark Tourism Research, Lancashire School of Business and
Enterprise, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK
ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
It may be categorically unpleasant to visit cemeteries, crash sites, Dark tourism; thanatourism;
and death camps, but tourists queue up to see such places. death; heritage; collective
Scholars have been attempting to explain this fascination with the memory
macabre and morbid since the mid-1990s. Early analyses of dark
tourism highlighted the modern and postmodern motivations
underlying this novel form of travel. As a result, much of the
subsequent work on this phenomenon has concentrated on
contemporary visits to modern sites such as Auschwitz or
Chernobyl. Yet, it is undeniable that ancient trips to the Roman
Colosseum and medieval pilgrimages to locations of martyrdom
had dark undertones, as many have noted. This round table
discussion draws together five scholars to consider how a variety
of forces have fuelled dark tourism in the past.
Adam T. Rosenbaum: editor’s introduction

Dark tourism is a popular subject these days. It has inspired the founding of the Institute
for Dark Tourism Research at the University of Central Lancashire, the launch of the aca-
demic journal, Current Issues in Dark Tourism Research, and the recent publication of the
Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies, featuring thirty essays exploring the various
facets of this phenomenon.1 But dark tourism is also a popular subject outside of academic
circles. In late July 2018, a show called Dark Tourist debuted on Netflix. This documentary
series follows the adventures of New Zealand journalist David Ferrier as he seeks out ‘the
mad, the macabre, and morbid’ in locations across the globe. In the first episode, Ferrier
defines ‘dark tourism’ as ‘a global phenomenon where people avoid the ordinary and
instead head for holidays in warzones, disaster sites, and other offbeat destinations’.2
Many of the destinations featured in the series are associated with death or destruction,
like the location of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, Texas, but other destinations
CONTACT Adam T. Rosenbaum arosenba@coloradomesa.edu

1
Philip R. Stone, Rudi Hartmann, A.V. Seaton, Richard Sharpley, and Leanne White, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Dark
Tourism Studies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
2
Dark Tourist, season 1, episode 1, ‘Latin America’, presented by David Ferrier, released July 20, 2018, on Netflix, online
streaming.
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
270 R. HARTMANN ET AL.
are just downright weird, like the Huis Ten Bosch theme park in southern Japan, which
features a hotel staffed entirely by robots.
However we define it, dark tourism clearly demolishes the simplistic definition of
tourism as ‘travelling for pleasure’.3 It is categorically unpleasant to visit cemeteries,
crash sites, and death camps, and yet people queue up to see such places. Scholars have
been attempting to explain this fascination with the macabre and morbid since the
mid-1990s. Chris Rojek started the conversation in 1993 by introducing the idea of
‘black spots’, defined as ‘the commercial developments of grave sites and sites in which
celebrities or large numbers of people have met with sudden and violent death’. According
to Rojek, this obsession is ‘widely shared’ and associated with ‘the landscape of postmo-
dernism’.4 Three years later, Anthony Seaton coined the term ‘thanatourism’ to describe
‘travel to a location wholly, or partially, motivated by the desire for actual or symbolic
encounters with death’. According to Seaton, the contemplation of death is common in
all cultures, but it has become more pronounced now that modern society has successfully
concealed death and rendered it taboo.5 In another article in the very same journal issue,
John Lennon and Malcolm Foley introduced the now fashionable phrase, ‘dark tourism’.6
In a subsequent monograph, they described dark tourism as ‘an intimation of post-mod-
ernity’, a practice that reveals larger anxieties about industrial, scientific, and political pro-
gress.7 In other words, visiting certain sights was a way to visualise the dangerous
consequences of new technologies and ideologies.
Early analyses of dark tourism highlighted the modern and postmodern motivations
underlying this novel form of travel. As a result, much of the subsequent work on this
phenomenon has concentrated on contemporary visits to modern sites like Auschwitz
or Chernobyl. Yet, it is undeniable that ancient excursions to the Roman Colosseum
and medieval pilgrimages to locations of martyrdom had dark undertones, as many
have noted.8 Recognising that the history of dark tourism has historical roots, we
should also acknowledge that it is not a homogeneous phenomenon, and different sites
have meant different things to visitors and travel promoters over time.
The Journal of Tourism History began this round table discussion with a simple ques-
tion: how have a variety of forces fuelled dark tourism in the past? Representing a variety
of scholarly perspectives, our four discussants include John Lennon, co-author of the
seminal book, Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Tourism; Alan Rice, an
expert in the field of the ‘Black Atlantic’; Daniel P. Reynolds, author of the recently-pub-
lished Postcards from Auschwitz: Holocaust Tourism and the Meaning of Remembrance;
and Rudi Hartmann, a geographer interested in heritage tourism, ecotourism, and
3
In the early nineteenth century, the Oxford English Dictionary first defined tourism, stressing the still novel concept of ‘tra-
velling for pleasure’. Hartmut Berghoff and Barbara Korte, ‘Britain and the Making of Modern Tourism: An Interdisciplinary
Approach’, in The Making of Modern Tourism: The Cultural History of the British Experience, 1600–2000, ed. Hartmut
Berghoff, Barbara Korte, Ralf Schneider, and Christopher Harvie (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 2, endnote 4.
4
Chris Rojek, Ways of Escape: Modern Transformations in Leisure and Travel (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993), 136, 138.
5
A.V. Seaton, ‘Guided by the Dark: From Thanatopsis to Thanatourism’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 2, no. 4
(1996): 240, 243.
6
Malcolm Foley and John Lennon, ‘JFK and Dark Tourism: A Fascination with Assassination’, International Journal of Heritage
Studies 2, no. 4 (1996): 198–211.
7
John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster (New York: Continuum, 2000), 11.
8
Philip R. Stone, ‘A Dark Tourism Spectrum: Towards a Typology of Death and Macabre Related Tourist Sites, Attractions and
Exhibitions’, Tourism: An Interdisciplinary International Journal 54, no. 2 (2006): 147; Seaton, ‘Guided by the Dark’, 236;
Lennon and Foley, Dark Tourism, 4.
JOURNAL OF TOURISM HISTORY 271
sustainable tourism planning. Philip R. Stone, the Executive Director of the Institute for
Dark Tourism Research and the editor of Current Issues in Dark Tourism Research,
serves as our commentator. Each of the discussants responded to the initial prompt
with opening remarks. Our commentator then offered his thoughts and raised some
additional questions. This sparked a second round of replies, followed by the commenta-
tor’s conclusion. The conversation went in some unexpected but fascinating directions,
touching upon issues like commercialisation, dissonant heritages, and collective
memory, while also considering the future of dark tourism. The contributors have left
us with plenty to think about, as well as some new research angles to consider.
Opening remarks
John Lennon: Dark tourism has become established as a specialist focus for tourism
research and has been used to discuss the wider fascination we appear to have with our
own mortality and the fate of others.9 However, death, suffering, visitation, and tourism
have been interrelated for many centuries as previously intimated.10 From ancient
Rome and gladiatorial combat to attendance at medieval public executions, death has
held a steadfast and enduring appeal. Sites associated with such phenomena may then
in turn become tourist attractions focused on this dark element of their past or part of
wider heritage interpretive theme(s).
However, in addition to the ancient, dark tourism has also exhibited elements (forces) of
the modern and post-modern. Modernity is usually associated with rationalism and proves
useful in the educative and learning justification often offered in relation to critiques of the
commercial development of, and visitation to, dark sites. The defence is constructed around
a logic of visitation as an elemental ‘learning’ experience. This rationalisation, logically, also
links to the importance of such sites as evidence of atrocity and evil. Clearly, the importance
of such sites as historical record and the complex arguments in relation to imagery,
interpretation, and motivations to view are further heightened by the demands and behav-
iour of visitors and tourists. Finally, it is in the area of post-modernity that the critical
influence of media coverage becomes evident. The wide range of social, digital, satellite,
and terrestrial telecommunications channels has undoubtedly heightened awareness of
acts of atrocity and evil. This is analogous to the influence of heightened media coverage
of terrorist acts on tourism destinations and subsequent patterns of travel. The severity of
such acts, in terms of loss of life, are now less significant if considered chronologically
against reportage and media coverage over the last decade. Visibility and media coverage,
which has grown exponentially, has had some of the most significant recent impacts on con-
sumer awareness and travel behaviour following terrorist atrocities. This influence by the
media is comparable to the coverage received by a number of dark sites.
The emotional attraction of dark sites is neither new nor culturally straightforward.
They offer more than sites of reflection, learning, and historical record yet have
9
Richard Sharpley and Philip R. Stone, eds., The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism (London:
Routledge, 2009); J.E. Tunbridge and G.J. Ashworth, Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in
Conflict (Chichester, UK: John Wiley 1995).
10
Lennon and Foley, Dark Tourism; A.V. Seaton and John J. Lennon, ‘New Horizons in Tourism: Strange Experiences and
Stranger Practices’, in Moral Panics, Ulterior Motives and Ulterior Desires: Thanatourism in the 21st century, ed. T.V.
Singh (Wallingford, UK: CABI Publishing 2004), 63–82.
simultaneously become part of the visitor experience. However, equally important in

understanding the forces and influences are the lessons from non-commemoration and
the loss of dark sites. This is linked to ideology, ownership of historical narratives, histor-
iography, and, at an operational level, aspects such as conservation skills and locally trans-
lated economic priorities. Such a range of causational factors confirms that objects and
sites do not exist in isolation and are imbued with meaning. The interpretation of
objects, buildings, and locations allows us to attempt to understand and comprehend
elements of our history which may at first glance be irreconcilable with our current
existence.
The development and interpretation of all dark heritage (as for heritage more generally)
is the result of complex interactions and pressures between stakeholders and interest
groups. Heritage is itself a contested terrain and the pursuit of historical ‘accuracy’ is
invariably compromised by competing ideologies, interpretation, funding, and politicisa-
tion and so on. Indeed, defining heritage, let alone agreeing on verifiable truths and nar-
ratives will invariably remain elusive.
The troubled history of the plantation houses of Charleston, South Carolina, USA are
cited as examples of historically important architectural structures which are the subject of
conservation legislation and protection.11 Yet these graceful structures are the product of
the excesses of slavery and the appalling exploitation of human labour. The continued
preservation and maintenance of such buildings has been the subject of some debate.
An alternative is to allow them to decay or obliterate them as a flawed commemoration.
This parallels debates on the maintenance of concentration camps and architectural evi-
dence of the Nazi past in Germany.12 The contemporary German landscape is heavily
populated with built heritage associated with the Nazi past, creating spiralling conserva-
tion and development costs. Obliteration and demolition (even of lesser sites and struc-
tures) has been challenged as a method of disguising an unacceptable past history. In
the case of the Nazi regime and the development of concentration camps this indeed
was the intention. These structures were originally developed as ‘temporary’ camps
which on completion of the Final Solution (the annihilation of Jews and others) would
in turn be annihilated like the victims they had incarcerated.13 If such dark heritage is
not commemorated it may be seen, in whole or part, as some form of complicit suppres-
sion of history. In this respect, the limited commemoration of the Roma and Sinti geno-
cide is a pertinent example that belies long-term and widespread racial and ethnic
prejudice that has been simply reaffirmed by the limited interpretation in former sites
of concentration camps.14 Such partial or selective narratives have been defined as the
process of creating multiple constructions of the past15 whereby history is never an
11
Graham M.S. Dann and A.V. Seaton, eds. Slavery, Contested Heritage and Thanatourism (Binghampton, NY: Haworth
Hospitality Press 2001).
12
Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Simon & Schuster 1988); Colin Philpott,
Relics of the Reich: The Buildings the Nazis Left Behind (York, UK: Trinners, 2016).
13
James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meanings (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1993).
14
John J. Lennon and Hugh Smith, ‘A Tale of Two Camps: Contrasting Approaches to Interpretation and Commemoration in
the Sites at Terezin and Lety, Czech Republic’, Tourism Recreation Research 29, no. 1 (2004): 15–25.
15
A. Craig Wight and John J. Lennon, ‘Selective Interpretation and Eclectic Human Heritage in Lithuania’, Tourism Manage-
ment 28, no. 2 (2007): 519–29.
objective recall of the past, but is rather a selective interpretation, based on the way in
which we view ourselves in the present.
Dark tourism sites present significant evidence of this selective interpretation and illus-
trate issues of cultural consumption and heritage commodification. This in turn gives rise
to societal implications including the exclusion of minority groups and problems with the
ethics of ‘selling’ the past.16 The ‘dark’ heritage landscape continues to exist in a digital age
of historical abbreviation and a society where ‘truth’ has become a commodity. These dark
sites will continue to be dominated by moral complexities surrounding their commemora-
tion/non-commemoration, education, and interpretation. It is only through addressing
ethical dichotomies and dealing with selectivity in much of the dominant historical nar-
rative, that dark tourism sites can maintain their relevance and centrality to our shared
past. Such sites offer a longitudinal perspective on what differentiates us as a species,
just as they can offer primacy of object(s) and ‘authentic’ experience(s) in contrast to con-
temporary simulated and virtual alternatives.
Alan Rice: In the summer of 1796 the retired headmaster of the Lancaster Royal Grammar
School, James Watson, was moved to make a daily pilgrimage to Sunderland Point, a spit
of land on the Lune Estuary, the entrance to the port of Lancaster. His mission was to raise
money from leisure visitors to the popular destination for the creation of a permanent
marker on the grave of a black boy buried there around sixty years before. The circum-
stances of Sambo’s arrival in Sunderland and his swift death there were not recorded in
any written record heretofore. His death was not registered at any church at the time,
and the only way his burial ground was remembered was through the oral narratives of
local residents, who decided that because of his non-Christian status he had to be
buried in unconsecrated ground. The local narrative was that of the white residents of
the Point, and is therefore unreliable and possibly partisan. It explains how the African
boy was left in the care of the innkeeper whilst his master took supplies into the city,
how he took ill, died, and abandoned by his master, was buried by the islanders.
Watson’s pilgrimage and fundraising was a response to two major motivations: first, a
rising national tide of abolition that had reached its zenith in the late 1780s and early
1790s and that had even penetrated the slaving port of Lancaster (4th largest in the
United Kingdom), and second, his own familial guilt as both his brothers had owned
shares in slaving voyages. Watson, by his very presence on the Point, would have encour-
aged casual visitors taking the sea air to venture to the gravesite down a narrow footpath
on the seaward side of the spit making the location an exemplary historical site of dark
tourism, long before the era of mass tourism. The forces that fuelled this transformation
of a pauper grave to a site of pilgrimage for those engaged in rethinking received ideas
about slavery and race are set loose by the liberating notion of abolition which would cul-
minate in the abolition of the slave trade in Britain and its territories in 1807.
Eventually, Watson was to raise enough money over the summer of 1796 to pay for a
stone slab to be placed over the grave and for a brass plaque to be affixed. Watson, in what
could be seen as an act of hubris, had inscribed on the plaque the final three verses of his
hyperbolically sentimental poem about Sambo and the gravesite, which, to my knowledge,
Dino Domic, ‘Heritage Consumption, Identity, Formation and Interpretation of the Past within Post War Croatia’, (Wolver-
16
hampton Business School Management Research Centre, Working Paper Series 2000).
was never published in print in his lifetime. This act of memorialisation changes the site
beyond recognition – from a simple unmarked grave in the rabbit warren at the bottom of
a farmer’s field which would probably have disappeared from all but the most arcane
knowledge, to a sophisticated burial plot. The transformed site enables Watson’s gener-
ation to frame ideological explanations which have more to do with their own emotional
needs than with attempting to understand the economic and political forces that brought
the young black man to Lancashire and led to his death: the history of the exploitation of
African labour in the Americas to make profits in Europe. The irony here is that had he
been buried unmarked in the Church at Overton (like the Christian residents of the Point)
his story would almost certainly been long forgotten. With the gravesite now sentimentally
memorialised by Watson, it is not forgotten and pilgrimages continue until the present.
These visits led to the gravesite’s development so that by the 1990s it was festooned
with mementoes, especially stones with messages for Sambo sometimes painted by school-
children in school projects which have continued to 2018. More recently young girls
especially have left hair bobbles on the modern cross as mementoes, taking intimate
objects associated with their engaged bodies to show their empathy with the African’s
story of loss. The modern cross itself is ironically placed here as this unconsecrated
spot seems to me to be colonised by a contemporary Christian sensibility when historically
the church had rejected the African.
In my 2003 monograph, Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic, I reflected on the para-
doxes at work here and how the African is subsumed into Anglo-European narratives that
ultimately and potentially undermine any radical work that could be done by the act of
memorialising his presence. It is such an important site because there are so few places
where we can memorialise the important contributions made by enslaved Africans to
the wealth of Britain. I discuss how:
Sambo’s grave is atypical, being a physical memory of black British historical presence in an
environment where the memories of such bodies are typically elided. His grave can only
perform as a radical narrative of the black Atlantic by the force of our memorialising activity.
By performing his memorialisation, however, we disavow the silence his grave could be said
to more properly bear witness to - a fitting and mute commentary on the sacrifice of bodies to
the greed of the slave traders. A mute voice speaks, but only as we ventriloquise it and surely
that makes the memorialisation successful mainly for ourselves.17
In commemorating sites of African Atlantic presence it behoves us to be very careful not to

be self-indulgent and not to be complicit in acts of appropriation that resemble the colo-
nisation or sentimentalisation of the past. Watson’s 1796 intervention saved this unique
site for posterity; however, the framing of it through antediluvian Christian sentimentality
means that as contemporary visitors to the site we must beware this clarion call and
attempt a more complex encounter that attempts to bear witness to Sambo’s death
rather than his subsequent framing. As Paul Ricoeur reminds us: ‘Extracting the exemp-
lary value from traumatic memories, it is justice that turns memory into a project, and it is
this same project of justice that gives the form of the future and the imperative to the duty
of memory’.18 In leading contemporary slave site tours to Sunderland Point, I am inspired
17
Alan Rice, Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic (London: Continuum, 2003), 217.
18
Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006),
88.
by Ricoeur’s vision of the continued search for justice which such traumatic sites can
engender. In this vision the slave site tour is not a wallowing in pain and trauma, but a
pedagogic praxis that enables action for change in the contemporary moment. If it does
not at least aspire to this then what is its point, but a pleasure principle for the entitled
and privileged who get a vicarious thrill from the horrors of the past.
Daniel P. Reynolds: Dark tourism, the apparently modern practice of visiting notorious
sites of death and disaster, has an ancient pedigree. Pilgrims have visited Jerusalem for
centuries to see the place where Jesus of Nazareth was crucified. The bones arranged in
the catacombs of Rome are no less macabre than those of the Rwandan genocide
victims on display in the Ntarama Church in Kigali. The Pyramids of Egypt are giant
tombs, and the Colosseum of Rome once offered killing as a spectator sport. And yet,
these older sites are not typically included among destinations of dark tourism. Does
the death depicted at a tourist site have to be recent to qualify as ‘dark’?
Dark tourism was defined by Lennon and Foley in 1996 to describe modern mass travel
to destinations associated with disaster, murder, and mass death. While they acknowledge
the long history of travel to the places where revered figures died, the majority of their
examples come from the more recent past for an important reason. As they write,
‘global communication technologies are inherent in both the events which are associated
with a dark tourism product and are present in the representation of the events for visitors
at the site itself’.19 What distinguishes dark tourism as a modern phenomenon is that some
calamities have captured the collective imagination through extensive media coverage, the
same technology that made the violence so lethal in the first place. Recall the Joseph
Goebbels’ (Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany) propaganda machine, or
the use of radio to demonise Tutsis in Rwanda as ‘cockroaches’.
As currently formulated, dark tourism theory engages in a critique of tourism in the age
of global capitalism, of which modern technologies of communication are an essential
part. That critique is important, but it tends to see travellers as consumers first, pilgrims
last. It is hard not to be cynical about the very idea of pilgrimage in the present age when
seen from the perspective of global capital, but anthropologists and travel writers know
that there is more to the experience of tourism than commodification.
In my own research into Holocaust-related tourism, I resist using the term ‘dark
tourism’ for several reasons. To call the Holocaust ‘dark’ is woefully euphemistic when
describing the shootings, gassings, starvation, and disease that claimed millions of lives.
Further, it minimises the importance of such travel for many of its participants, some
of whom are survivors or their descendants. In conflating Holocaust tourism with visits
to the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas or Robben Island near Cape Town, dark tourism
theory overlooks unique factors that shape Holocaust tourism in the present. These
include the end of the Cold War, which made travel to Holocaust sites far more practical,
and the awareness that the last living witnesses and survivors of the Nazi genocide are
passing. While I appreciate the attention dark tourism theory pays to modern technology,
I am reminded that all technology has been ‘modern’ at one time or another. But since the
term is probably here to stay, a more historically open approach to dark tourism may yield
19
Lennon and Foley, Dark Tourism, 16–21.
useful insights into additional factors alongside technologies of communication that have
worked in tandem to influence travel.
Tourism scholars, including Lennon and Foley, often mention Canterbury Tales as
an early portrait of group pilgrimage, a precursor to modern-day travel.20 Depicting
travellers on their way to the place where Thomas à Becket was slain, Chaucer’s
work happens also to be the first book produced in English by William Caxton’s print-
ing press in 1476. The fact that a century separates Chaucer’s unfinished tale from its
appearance in print also reminds us that other ‘technologies’ of communication – both
oral history and the institution of clerical scribes – have accompanied the phenomenon
of travel, for Becket’s shrine remained one of the most important destinations of pil-
grimage for centuries.
What made the site of Becket’s murder so meaningful to so many pilgrims? As with
tourists today, motivations for medieval pilgrimage travel drew on a complex web of
factors such as personal wealth, religious devotion, family connections, business interests,
curiosity, and more. By canonising Becket soon after his death, Pope Alexander III made a
political statement designed to assert Rome’s authority over the Church in England, with
pilgrims to the Canterbury Cathedral a potent reminder of the Church’s sway over the
Plantagenets.
The case for medieval pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral as dark tourism has impor-
tant implications for how we think about death-related tourism today. First, it reinforces
the notion by anthropologists who have long argued that modern tourism and ancient pil-
grimage have more in common than the difference in terms might suggest. Nelson
Graburn, Dean MacCannell, Malcolm Crick, and others have contended that modern-
day travel fulfils many of the same needs on the part of travellers that religious pilgrimage
once did, offering a way of finding transcendent meaning outside of one’s daily life.21
Second, the politics of pilgrimage to Canterbury remind us of the link between ritual
travel and state authority. Tourists make embodied responses to the political calculations
of competing institutions of authority, upholding or contesting those interests in their
choice of itinerary.
A modern example comes from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum, cited in
every list of dark tourism destinations. In the immediate postwar years, tourism to Ausch-
witz became a way for the Communist government to reinforce the narrative of liberation
by the Soviet Union while simultaneously articulating a national narrative of Polish
suffering. Auschwitz became emblematic of the genocide of Europe’s Jews only decades
later. Even today, Auschwitz tourism confronts these different agendas, with Polish Cath-
olicism and national identity continuing to claim a space associated internationally with
the remembrance of Europe’s murdered Jews.22
20
For example, see Bill Faulkner, Gianna Moscardo, and Eric Laws, ‘Introduction: Moving Ahead and Looking Back’, in
Tourism in the 21st Century: Reflections on Experience, ed. Bill Faulkner, Gianna Moscardo, and Eric Laws Faulkner
(London and New York: Continuum, 2000), 112. See also Malcolm Crick, ‘Representations of International Tourism in
the Social Sciences: Sun, Sex, Sights, Savings, and Servility’, Annual Review of Anthropology 18 (1989): 335; Lennon
and Foley, Dark Tourism, 4.
21
Crick, ‘Representations of International Tourism’, 332–5; Nelson Graburn, ‘Tourism: The Sacred Journey’, in Hosts and
Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism, ed. Valene Smith (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 21–36;
Dean MacCannell, The Tourist. A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 43–8.
22
See Jonathan Huener, Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979 (Athens: Ohio University Press,
2003).
My point is not to deny the unique features of death-focused tourism in the present.
There is something qualitatively different about tourism in an age when creating and cus-
tomising travel experiences has never been easier, and when information, including
graphic images and videos of disaster, can spread virally across the Internet. However,
modern technology is common to all forms of travel, and applies to 3S (sea, sand, sun)
tourism as much as travel to sites of death and disaster. It is perhaps by dint of that simi-
larity, whereby a trip to Auschwitz becomes structurally identical to a trip to Disney
World, that also leads dark tourism research to reach predictable conclusions about the
presumed inauthenticity of present-day travel to sites of death and disaster.23 A more his-
torical view may temper that tendency by recalling other factors that motivate all kinds of
tourism, including its dark varieties.
Rudi Hartmann: Special thanks for inviting me, a human geographer with interest in heri-
tage tourism, to be part of a scholarly discussion about dark tourism in the past. First, for
clarification: I agree with Anthony Seaton that the thanatourists’ (or dark tourists’)
inherent fascination with death and dying and the desire for actual or symbolic encounters
has antecedents that date back many centuries, even to the Christian Medieval time
period.24 I also agree with Richard Sharpley and Philip Stone that the avoidance of
death in contemporary secular society has resulted in or contributed to the dark
tourism phenomenon.25 Conversely, I disagree with John Lennon and Malcom Foley
that dark tourism is an expression of the post-modern condition.26 However, I do agree
that these five scholars have been instrumental in launching a new thanatourism/dark
tourism research tradition within the intellectual framework of UK tourism studies as
well as in the spatial context of research in Southern Scotland/Northern England.27
I believe it is not only important to identify credible and possible expressions of dark
tourism in the past and the forces that fuelled them, the given initial question, but to
give due attention to a further question: in which context did the notion of dark
tourism and the eventual formation of a new research tradition develop? While the two
historic questions appear to be different in scope and direction, they both touch upon
closely intertwined themes: our search for ‘dark tourists’ in the recent or distant past
and the continued effort to denote, explain, and define such behaviours in the evolving
and widening ‘dark tourism’ literature.
Geographers have examined the innovation and diffusion of ideas and artefacts, such as
past agricultural practices and present-day consumer goods. In the following, I would like
to apply a geographic analysis to where and in which spatial context the thana- and dark
tourism research tradition originated and eventually diffused. The above mentioned five
scholars worked and lived in Southern Scotland and Northern England during the
1995–2007 period (the terms thanatourism and dark tourism terms were first introduced
23
I refer here specifically to Tim Cole’s use of the term ‘Auschwitz-Land’ to refer to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial
Museum in his work, Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler: How History is Bought, Packaged, and Sold
(New York: Routledge, 1999), 111.
24
A.V. Seaton, ‘Thanatourism and Its Discontents: An Appraisal of a Decade’s Work with Some Future Issues and Directions’,
in The SAGE Handbook of Tourism Studies, ed. Tazim Jamal and Mike Robinson (Los Angeles: Sage, 2009), 521–42.
25
Sharpley and Stone, The Darker Side of Travel.
26
Lennon and Foley, Dark Tourism.
27
Rudi Hartmann, ‘Dark Tourism, Thanatourism and Dissonance in Heritage Tourism Management: New Directions in Con-
temporary Tourism Research’, Journal of Heritage Tourism 9, no. 2 (2014): 167–74.
and publicised in 1996). Seaton, Lennon, and Foley were affiliated with academic insti-
tutions in Glasgow (Strathclyde University, Glasgow Caledonian University). Sharpley,
a graduate of Sheffield University, Strathclyde University (Glasgow), and Lancaster Uni-
versity, taught at several Northern England academic institutions: University of Northum-
bria (at Newcastle), University of Lincoln (south of Hull), and since 2007 at University of
Central Lancashire (Preston). At Preston, he formed jointly with Stone a tourism research
core group with distinct focus on the new dark tourism orientation. While Sharpley
retained a high recognition in the wider tourism study field, Stone, a former management
consultant, built a specialised and very effective ‘Dark Tourism Forum’ website. Thus, the
research centre shifted from ‘Glasgow’ (with the relocation of Seaton to Bedfordshire and
the departure of dark tourism name creator Foley from the research arena) to Preston
where the dark tourism research agenda was vastly expanded and eventually a new Insti-
tute of Dark Tourism Research opened. An exception to the regional background hypoth-
esis is Graham Dann, an early contributor to the field.28 During 1996–2007 he was
affiliated with the University of Luton (in the northern part of the wider London Metro-
politan Area), though he was born and grew up in Edinburgh, Scotland. Sharpley, Stone,
and to a lesser degree Dann helped to spread the new dark tourism perspective within the
UK by organising conference sections and sessions in the late 2000s29 – before the new
concepts and perspectives in dark tourism ‘went global’.30
If we step back to the earliest formulation of the ideas as well as fast forward to the
growing number of reviewers of the dark tourism research tradition, two scholars stand
out: Chris Rojek and Duncan Light. In a 1993 publication, Rojek noted the growing popu-
larity of places associated with the death of celebrities and visits to other grave sites which
he labelled tourism to ‘black spots’.31 On the other end, Light has presented arguably the
most comprehensive history of dark tourism research to date.32 Not surprisingly, both
Rojek and Light originally worked in Southern Scotland or Northern England (at
Queens College, Glasgow, and Staffordshire University, Stoke-on-Trent, as well as at
Liverpool and Manchester academic institutions respectively) before moving on to
London and Bournemouth.
My argument here is that the economic and social environment of Southern Scotland
and Northern England offered new opportunities for work in academe. Both industrial
regions went through an extended period of severe de-industrialisation (1950–1990).
The local employment situation was considered dire. A panacea for job creation was
sought, in form of tertiary sector activities including tourism services. In the early
1990s, some of the smaller colleges and poly-tech schools near industrial neighbourhoods
in the North were elevated to full university status. Among others, Queen’s College and
Glasgow Polytechnic were merged to create Glasgow Caledonian University and the
Harris Art College/Preston Polytech/Lancashire Politech became the University of
28
Graham Dann, ‘Children of the Dark’, in Horror and Human Tragedy Revisited: The Management of Sites of Atrocities for
Tourism, ed. G.J. Ashworth and Rudi Hartmann (New York: Cognizant, 2005), 233–52.
29
Sharpley and Stone, The Darker Side of Travel; Sharpley and Stone, eds., Tourist Experience: Contemporary Perspectives
(London: Routledge, 2011); Sharpley and Stone, eds., Contemporary Tourist Experience: Concepts and Consequences
(London: Routledge, 2012).
30
Stone, Hartmann, Seaton, Sharpley, and White, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies.
31
Rojek, Ways of Escape.
32
Duncan Light, ‘Progress in Dark Tourism and Thanatourism Research: An Uneasy Relationship with Heritage Tourism’,
Tourism Management 61 (August 2017): 275–301.
Central Lancashire. Pioneers in UK tourism studies such as John Urry (Lancaster

University) and proponents of the new thana- and dark tourism orientation found
employment in the North, established their careers, and excelled. This Northern British
network of active tourism researchers may have helped to formulate and disseminate
the notion of dark tourism within England/UK. Later on, internet communication
initiated particularly by Stone resulted in a much wider list of interested academicians
and media experts.
If I were an environmental determinist (I am not!) the argumentation could be pushed
that it was (pre-eminently) the climate and light conditions that triggered so much interest
in the ‘darkness’ theme farther North. By contrast, little or no interest in the ‘darker’
aspects of tourism emerged in ‘sunnier’ parts of England, such as in Brighton or Cam-
bridge, by the 1990s/early 2000s. If I favoured the ‘nature versus nurture’ dichotomy (I
do not!), the argument could be made that it was the social environment of the run-
down industrial wastelands that (among others) shaped the personal values and develop-
ment of social scientists in the North.
Philip R. Stone: comment

Dark tourism as a nomenclature exists in the imagination of scholars who wish to shine a
critical light on heritage that hurts. As such, ‘ghosts’ of the significant ‘Other’ dead who
haunt our collective conscience have been increasingly commodified through memorials,
museums, and visitor attractions – and, consequently, the dead now occupy touristic land-
scapes. In other words, the term ‘dark tourism’ (or thanatourism) has been branded into
an internationally recognised taxonomy to denote travel to sites of or sites associated with
death and ‘difficult heritage’ within global visitor economies. As contributors to this round
table discussion have pointed out, dark tourism is a broad, provocative, and contested
concept; dividing opinion both within academic practice as well as in empirical circles.
While dark tourism as a scholarly term may have been imposed upon the tourism
sector by academia, as Rudi Hartmann implies, touristic sites of death and disaster
across the world often blur the line between commemoration and commercialisation.
Yet, despite its historical foundations in practice, dark tourism as a multi-disciplinary
field of study attempts to capture contemporary (re)presentations of the noteworthy
dead. Hence, dark tourism allows us to examine issues of dissonance, politics, and histori-
city, as well as furthering our sociological understanding of death, the dead, and collective
memory. In turn, dark tourism permits the dead to become contemporary commodities,
and for tragic memories to be retailed in socially-sanctioned tourist environments. Even
so, the semi-compulsive nature of consuming dark tourism ensures we do not encounter
the actual corpse, but instead the heritage industry mediates specific narratives of the
known and unknown dead.
The dominion of dark tourism offers a selective voice and records tragedy across time,
space, and context and, subsequently, can provide reflectivity of both place and people.
Different cultural, political, and linguistic representations of dark tourism and varying
interpretive experiences are complex and multifarious and cannot be taken at face
value. Instead, dark tourism in its many guises offers visual signifiers and multiplicity of
meanings within touristic landscapes, as global visitor sites function as retrospective wit-
nesses to acts of atrocity or tragedy. Contemporary memorialisation is played out at the
interface of dark tourism, where consumer experiences can catalyse sympathy for the
victims or revulsion at the context. Yet, despite the cultural complexity and moral dilem-
mas of dark tourism, we disconnect a (tragic) past from the (fretful) present for our
(hopeful) future. We gaze at dark tourism in the knowledge that the victims are already
dead, though the precise context and history of the victims can never be truly understood.
Ultimately, dark tourism and its difficult heritage is about death and the dead, but through
its current production and ephemeral consumption, it perhaps tells us more about life and
the living.
It is here, that the initial question of this round table is posed: how have a variety of
forces fuelled dark tourism in the past? Before turning to specific contributor remarks,
it is perhaps worth noting the origin and transformations of ‘dark tourism’ in practice.
In short, it is traditional travel that has evolved and been shaped by profound shifts in
the history of European culture – that are still evident today. Anthony Seaton argues
that three key historical epochs have defined dark tourism in its current Western tradition.
The first was the pilgrimages of Christianity that developed between the fourth and six-
teenth centuries and its unique doctrinal emphasis on fatality. As Seaton provocatively
notes with reference to the cross as the identifying symbol of Christians, ‘Christianity
was the first, and only, world religion to make an instrument of torture and death its cor-
porate logo’.33 Indeed, during the Middle Ages, a journey to gaze upon relics of the saints
offered the only valid excuse for leaving home.34 The second was antiquarianism and its
related secular-sacred ideology of national heritage that first emerged in sixteenth-century
Europe. This period witnessed the recording and subsequent promotion of the significant
death of cultural figures, politicians, artists, and so on, as well as memorials, epitaphs, and
ancient burial grounds. The final epoch was the period of Romanticism and its complex
nexus of literary, artistic, and philosophical ideas that were founded in Britain, France,
and Germany in the last half of the eighteenth century and through the nineteenth
century, and which added to the propensity for secular, death-related travel that continues
today.
As we enter the contemporary age of dark tourism, John Lennon in his opening
remarks reminds us of his original assertion that dark tourism is an intimation of postmo-
dernity.35 However, in this discussion, Lennon clarifies his position that the dark tourism
concept does indeed have evident historical pedigree and, subsequently, reaffirms the
ancient heritage of the phenomena. Nevertheless, Lennon rightly asserts that dark
tourism today, rather than being a product of postmodernity, is in fact influenced by
the postmodern condition. In other words, though dark tourism may be ‘an old
concept in a new world’,36 Lennon notes the contemporary nature of the phenomenon,
its ideological and socio-political development, its selective and often contentious
interpretation, as well as the role of modern technology, media, and imagery in promoting
and accessing such visitor sites. Indeed, dark tourism may have emerged from the rem-
nants of past death-related travel, but dark tourism today displays hallmarks of a
33
Seaton, ‘Thanatourism and Its Discontents’, 527.
34
Anneli Rufus, Magnificent Corpses: Searching Through Europe for St. Peter’s Head, St. Claire’s Heart, St. Stephen’s Hand, and
Other Saints’ Relics (New York: Marlowe & Company, 1999).
35
Lennon and Foley, Dark Tourism.
36
Philip R. Stone, ‘Dark Tourism – an Old Concept in a New World’, TOURISM Magazine by the Tourism Society IV, no. 125
(2005), http://works.bepress.com/philip_stone/26/ (accessed April 19, 2018).
contemporary ‘spectacular death’ mentality.37 To that end, Lennon alludes to the fact that
we are reviving, retrieving, rediscovering, and reinventing death in a heritage tourism
process in which old and almost forgotten practices and ideals are mixed with new
social conditions characteristic of individualised, globalised, mediatised, and technologi-
cally advanced postmodern society.38 However, Lennon makes an important point in
terms of historical abbreviation inherent in dark tourism in a semiotic ‘post-truth’ age.
It is here that dark tourism exposes particularities of people, place, and culture where vis-
iting sites of fatality can reveal ontological anxieties about the past as well as the future.
The emergent question, therefore, is how and why difficult heritage as semiotic construc-
tions of the past, and experienced through dark tourism, is politically engineered and
socially orchestrated? Is the symbolic representation of the dead inherent in dark
tourism promoting an ‘engineered remembrance’,39 whereby modern memorialisation
is failing to sufficiently remind us of our yesteryear fights, struggles, and tragic follies –
and ultimately doomed to repetition? Thus, dark tourism symbolises sites of dissonant
heritage, sites of selective silences, sites rendered political and ideological, sites powerfully
intertwined with interpretation and meaning, and sites of the imaginary and the imagined.
Engaging with these concepts of the imaginary and the imagined, Alan Rice offers a
dark tourism case based on the abhorrent slavery legacy of Great Britain and her
empire. On a windswept peninsula in north-west England at Sunderland Point (a place
I am very familiar with), the story of ‘Sambo’ the slave boy is immortalised through his
burial plot and Watson’s poem. Against a backdrop of a melancholic seascape, tidal
marshes, and rural idyll combined, tourists now visit the atmospheric grave and recall
the stain of Britain’s slavery heritage. While the sentimental poem by Watson was
written against a context of slavery abolition and emotional familial ties, Watson essen-
tially venerated ‘Sambo’ and, subsequently, the gravesite has become a nodal point in Brit-
ain’s slavery landscape. Early tourism to the site would have probably been very much like
it is today – a rambling journey through a romantic panorama – directed towards the
liminal gravesite with echoes of Christian memorialisation. Yet, while the isolated grave
resonates a narrative of the ‘Black Atlantic’,40 Sambo lives on in memory, his tomb expos-
ing the selective amnesia of Britain’s role in human slavery. Of course, (dark) tourism to
the grave has allowed past traumatic memories and bygone social injustices to be
(re)framed, yet the extent of memorialisation ‘success/failure’ is once again evident. If,
as Rice suggests, Sambo’s death represents ‘a pedagogic praxis that enables action for
change in the contemporary moment’, then the question is: to what extent does
Sambo’s grave as a memorial fostered by the visitor economy expose and translate contin-
ued slavery and clandestine human trafficking today? Indeed, does the chronological dis-
tance of Sambo’s death mean that our slavery past is safely secured, memorialised in a
historical afterlife, and therefore the mistakes of our ancestors confined to the dominion
of the dead?
37
Philip R. Stone, ‘Dark Tourism in an Age of “Spectacular Death”’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies, 189–
210.
38
Michael Hviid Jacobsen, ‘“Spectacular Death” – Proposing a New Fifth Phase to Philippe Ariès’s Admirable History of
Death’, Humanities 5, no. 9 (2016): 19.
39
A.V. Seaton, ‘Encountering Engineered and Orchestrated Remembrance: A Situational Model of Dark Tourism and its
History’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies, 9–31.
40
Rice, Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic.
The issue of chronological distance is raised by Daniel Reynolds in his remarks about
dark tourism and notions of historic pilgrimages. While Reynolds accepts the influence of
contemporary technology and media, as outlined by Lennon, he locates broader dark
tourism within the confines of bygone pilgrimages as well as the postmodern search for
authentic experiences. Of course, debates about tourism and authenticity are well
rehearsed, as is the case for so-called ‘post-tourism’, and these arguments are not repeated
here. However, Reynolds raises an important point in reminding us of the link between
ritual travel, secular pilgrimages, and state authority. In an age of mobility, ‘pilgrimage
landscapes’41 are evident through social constructions and the process of socialisation –
a sequential process by which (dark) tourism attractions are marked as quasi-religious
shrines.42 Consequently, Reynolds highlights the Canterbury Tales as a medieval foun-
dation for travel to sites of political murder, ideological domination, and social
mayhem. With an emergent ‘politics of pilgrimage’ framework, Reynolds contrasts a
modern example in Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum – a site of genocide
that haunts our contemporary imagination. Yet, while Auschwitz-Birkenau had its museo-
logical inauguration in 1947, memorial politics of the site have evolved, particularly during
the Warsaw Pact years and later with Poland’s admittance to the EU. Today, with the
advent of budget air travel to the region and development of nearby Krakow as a cultural
tourism destination, the Holocaust site has become an epitome of ‘dark tourism’ for the
scale and nature of atrocities committed there. Yet, despite record numbers of tourists
now visiting Auschwitz, and notwithstanding the political nature of memorialisation –
including selective recall or so-called ‘heredity victimhood’ – Reynolds laments that,
without historical grounding, ‘a trip to Auschwitz becomes structurally identical to a
trip to Disney World’. Once again, the very essence of memorialisation through dark
tourism is being called into question. However, the issue is not with memorialisation
itself but with memory – or at least shared narratives of collective memory. The
Holocaust – a focus for Reynold’s secular pilgrimage – was not only the bureaucratic
calculus of death by a Nazi German state but also involved the demonic passions of the
populace. Arguably, Holocaust memorials rarely convey this message; and as tourists
consume historical places of pain and shame, ‘we would be utter fools to think it can’t
happen again, or that the world will never have any more reason to build memorials’.43
In summary, Lennon, Rice, and Reynolds have offered viewpoints of the forces that
have fuelled the dark tourism phenomena – from early pilgrimage travel, to selective pol-
itical and socio-cultural interpretations, to dark tourism sites being agents of historic and
contemporary change. As a result, all three contributors have suggested tourist sites of
tragic history are places where public and vernacular (hi)stories and memories intersect
and act in dialogue. Much of this dialogue is increasingly being captured and studied
within the confines of the dark tourism concept. It is here that Rudi Hartmann offers a
different if not personal account of how dark tourism as a field of study emerged in the
41
Derek H. Alderman, ‘Writing on the Graceland Wall: On the Importance of Authorship in Pilgrimage Landscapes’, Tourism
Recreation Research 27, no. 2 (2002): 27–33.
42
A.V. Seaton, ‘Thanatourism’s Final Frontiers? Visits to Cemeteries, Churchyards and Funerary Sites as Scared and Secular
Pilgrimage’, Tourism Recreation Research 27, no. 2 (2002): 73–82; Noga Collins-Kreiner, ‘Dark Tourism as/is Pilgrimage’,
Current Issues in Tourism 19, no. 12 (2016): 1185–9.
43
Jonathan Jones, ‘War Memorials Have Failed – We Have Forgotten the Chaos of Fascism’, The Guardian, December 19,
2016, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2016/dec/09/war-memorials-have-failed-peter-
eisenman-holocaust (accessed April 18, 2018).
UK (and was globally exported), and which continues to provide thought-leadership.

Hartmann cites one of the forces driving dark tourism as a research tradition was the
fact that pioneer scholars of the field all came from Northern England/Southern Scotland.
Hartmann goes on to claim that the industrial Badlands of the region provided the social
environment in which ‘dark tourism’ emerged and developed as an academic construct. Of
course, it is true that most of the pioneer scholars do currently reside and work in (Hart-
mann’s bleak) north of England; though others do not and have always worked in (Hart-
mann’s sunnier) south of England. [I actually spent my formative years in the British
Midlands, and spent much of my early career based in London and south-west
England, and worked across the UK and continental Europe.] Consequently, while Hart-
mann is sincere in his analysis, I remain to be convinced that the so-called ‘social environ-
ment of the run-down industrial wastelands’ shaped the ‘personal values and
development’ of pioneer dark tourism social scientists of the ‘British North’. Rather, we
ended up at specific universities by design and choice rather than default and chance;
and the vibrancy of our re-energised regions and forward-thinking institutions allowed
dark tourism to flourish as a multidisciplinary field.
However, regardless of where the dark tourism concept was founded, it is clear that the
provocative term has bought together global scholars from across the disciplinary field.
Moreover, it is clear that discussions in this first round have bought up issues of collective
memory, contested narratives, and the effectiveness of memorialisation within the visitor
economy. To that end, in the next round, I would like discussants to offer a critical insight
as whether dark tourism and inherent memorial messages from a tragic past are getting
through; and, if so, what are those historic messages and do they render warnings from
history? In short, is memorialisation through dark tourism working?
Responses
Lennon: Whilst I have great respect and interest for the direction and range of dark
tourism research in the wider field and believe that this direction and growth is healthy,
I remain focussed on its vital role in evidence and education. Here tourism has
assumed an important place amongst other subject areas. Recent research on tourism
related to incarceration, crime, and prison as well as the interpretation of war illustrates
the potential for wider debate and movement into other disciplinary areas.44 Similarly,
work in the area of crime and memory reaffirms the importance of the evidential role
of the dark subject matter.45
The current situation in Cambodia is pertinent to this debate. One popular dark tourist
attraction in this country is Security Office 21, a former Khmer Rouge incarceration site.
Whilst not unique in its interpretation of barbarism and genocide, the site known locally
as S-21 is an increasingly crucial part of evidence and an important conduit for education
44
Martin Gegner and Bart Ziino, eds., The Heritage of War (London: Routledge, 2011); Joan Beaumont, ‘Contested Transna-
tional Heritage: The Demolition of Changi Prison, Singapore’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 15, no. 4 (June
2009): 294–316; Carolyn Strange and Michael Kempa, ‘Shades of Dark Tourism: Alcatraz and Robben Island’, Annals of
Tourism Research 30, no. 2 (April 2003): 386–405.
45
Gil Eyal, ‘Identity and Trauma: Two Forms of the Will to Memory’, History and Memory 16, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2004): 5–
36; Kevin Blackburn, ‘War Memory and Nation Building in South East Asia’, South East Asia Research 18, no. 1 (March
2010): 5–31; Margaret Mitchell, Remember Me: Constructing Immortality: Beliefs on Immortality, Life, and Death (Abingdon,
UK: Routledge, 2007).
in a country where the current government are far from comfortable with the recent past.
It is widely acknowledged that between 1.5 and 2 million Cambodians died during the rule
of the Khmer Rouge.46 Today, the country contains 167 former Security Offices and 19,440
mass graves. The mass graves hold the bodies of those deliberately executed, but they do
not contain or record the young, the old, or the sick who died along the road in the forced
evacuations, nor those who died from malnutrition, forced labour, paucity of medicines, or
other causes.
S-21 and the other major site associated with the Khmer Rouge, Choeung Ek (com-
monly known as ‘the Killing Field’), challenge the simplistic and idealistic imagery that
presents Cambodia as a ‘gentle land’ with a people locked in the embrace of Theravada
Buddhism’s peaceful doctrines. Such perspectives disregard the documented existence
of past violence and genocide as evidenced at these sites. Whilst other independent repo-
sitories of evidence exist, such as the Documentation Centre of Cambodia (DC-Cam), they
are much less likely to be visited by tourists.47
The selective and partial interpretation of the recent past has influenced Cambodia’s
failure to punish, or even remove from positions of authority, those responsible for acts
of genocide. The delayed response of the Cambodian government and the international
community to the overwhelming evidence is both astonishing and tragic. After seven
years of negotiation, the Cambodian government agreed with the UN to bring to trial
the surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge in October 2004. Putting no more than 10 indi-
viduals in total on trial seemed to be only a partial solution. Moreover, the number of
leaders who were tried and successfully sentenced to life in prison in 2017 were just
three: Nuon Chea (Brother Number Two), Kang Kek Ieu (the former Director of S-21)
and Khieu Samphan (former Khmer Rouge Head of State).48 The overt resistance by
the Prime Minister Hun Sen to an expanded trial has ensured this will be the last trial
of any perpetrator of the genocide. As a former Khmer Rouge soldier himself, Hun Sen
has not faced legal redress and in 2017, he was responsible for the abolition of the main
opposition party and essentially Cambodian democracy.49
For those who aim to understand this complex country and its tragic recent history,
dark tourism and the visitation of sites such as S-21 provide an experience that is eviden-
tial, commemorative, and educational in a country where both democracy and freedom of
speech cannot be taken for granted. Clearly, in some locations the narrative remains
46
For contrasting assessment of the scale of the genocide, see Karl D. Jackson, ed., Cambodia 1975–1978: Rendezvous with
Death (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Central Intelligence Agency, Kampuchea: A Demographic Cata-
strophe (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1980); Michael Vickery, ‘Democratic Kampuchea: Themes
and Variations’, in Cambodia 1975–1982, ed. David Chandler (Boston: South End Press, 1984), 178–98.
47
DC-Cam was established in 1995 by Yale University’s Cambodian Genocide Program, to facilitate training and field
research in Cambodia. It was created to collect as much data as possible of the Khmer Rouge period and has
amassed hundreds of thousands of documents, photographs, and evidence of the genocide. DC-Cam is a not-for-
profit, non-government, non-political, and non-judicial body. It is internationally-funded and acknowledged as indepen-
dent and non-partisan. The Centre is a major source of information about the period 1975–79 based on impartial inquiry
into facts and history. For further details see www.dccam.org.
48
Seth Mydans, ‘Khmer Rouge Trial, Perhaps the Last, Nears End in Cambodia’, The New York Times, June 23, 2017, https://
www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/world/asia/cambodia-khmer-rouge-vietnam.html (accessed July 17, 2018); Seth Mydans,
‘11 Years, $300 Million and 3 Convictions. Was the Khmer Rouge Tribunal Worth It?’, The New York Times, April 10, 2017,
2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/10/world/asia/cambodia-khmer-rouge-united-nations-tribunal.html (accessed
July 17).
49
Oliver Holmes, ‘“Death of Democracy” in Cambodia as Court Dissolves Opposition’, The Guardian, November 16, 2017,
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/16/death-of-democracy-cambodia-court-dissolves-opposition-hun-sen
(accessed July 17, 2018).
problematic. Operators of tourist attractions that constitute a major learning experience

for some visitors have to be aware that they have potential to influence the historical,
social, and cultural meanings represented. The selection, interpretation, and conservation
of elements of the past are critical in understanding what is considered and how it is
represented.50
Dark tourism sites provide multiple narratives around tragic events. They offer a range
of content driven by influences as diverse as simple commercial gain to the complex inter-
action of political, economic, and ideological agendas.51 In each case, interpretation articu-
lates heritage through objects, artefacts, audio recording, place, or imagery. These elements
exist in environment(s) of their creation. In the case of Cambodia, this occurs in a nation
that has only a selective acceptance of its role in this genocide. Historical memorialisation
remains embedded in interests that are global, commercial, and ideological but rarely
neutral.
Rice: In Williamson Park, Lancaster, there is a stone bench, one of three in that area of the
city. It is inscribed with the name Rev. T. Wright London, 1863. This act of philanthropy
from a metropolitan clergyman to his northern countrymen, an offer of a sleeping shelter
to the vagrant poor, is one of the few signs left of a deadly event that impacted the entire
Lancashire region, the Lancashire Cotton Famine. Lancaster was one of 29 towns in the
county that handed out extra amounts of Poor Relief in the period 1861–64. This came
in the wake of the cotton embargo by the Union North that attempted to destroy the
economy of the Confederate South during the American Civil War. The devastating econ-
omic effects on Lancashire cotton mills meant that thousands from all over the world
(including the Pope and President Lincoln) donated to ameliorate the conditions of
workers. Hundreds of thousands of male, female, and child labourers were laid off
during the horror years of 1862–63 and some were forced into vagrancy while untold hun-
dreds died as a consequence of poverty-induced famine. Williamson Park’s beautiful
gardens, walkways, and water features were hewn out of the quarry on the edge of
town through public works to keep idle hands at work. It was the labour of the ex-
cotton workers which created the splendour of the park. The bench is really the only
extant memorial of their labour in a park which glories in memorialising the industrialist
James Williamson, who later built a Taj Mahal-like memorial to his deceased wife at the
centre of the park.
The bench is an amazingly resonant, if simply constructed, intersectional symbol. It
highlights class exigencies through its remembering of the workers. It draws attention
to gender in that as Sven Beckert asserts in his seminal study, The Cotton Empire: ‘We
tend to recall industrial capitalism as male-dominated, whereas women’s labour largely
created the empire of cotton’.52 Finally, it evokes race because the Confederate States
built an economy where cotton was king on the backs of a slave system that relied on
nearly four million slaves by 1860. There is no plaque on the bench to make these links
50
For useful discussion see G.J. Ashworth, ‘The Memorialisation of Violence and Tragedy: Human Trauma as Heritage’, in The
Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity, ed. Peter Howard and Brian Graham (London: Routledge, 2008),
231–44; Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage (London: Routledge, 2006).
51
Martin Gegner, ‘War Monuments in East and West Berlin: Cold War Symbols or Different Forms of Memorial?’, in The Heri-
tage of War, 64–87.
52
Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Vintage, 2014), xviii.
and an explanatory panel in the permanent exhibition in the Ashton Memorial has a
cursory explication which fails to situate the philanthropy in its full context. The
tragedy the exhibit concentrates on is the personal tragedy of James Williamson, Lord
Ashton, who reportedly never recovered from the bereavement attendant on the death
of his wife, whose monument can still be seen for miles around as it bestrides this
highest point in the city. The warning from history then is that we should not be
blinded by the light of extravagant memorialisation by those in power, for it will often
elide darker and so-called minority histories.
Dark tourism might be very interested in the death and memorialisation in Williamson
Park, however, a politically astute dark tourism would look beneath the memorial’s staged
magnificence to find histories that it occludes. Many of these histories are not written
down or are lost in obscure documents and must be discovered in the interstices of the
archives and beyond. Many of them are being discovered as we speak. Hence, the autobio-
graphy of the ex-slave James Johnson makes links between these intersectional histories
and exemplifies the vagrants’ life that benches like the Reverend’s helped succour. He
did not get as far north as Lancaster in his vagrancy but his is an exemplary journey occa-
sioned by the Cotton Famine. His pamphlet, The Life of the Late James Johnson, Coloured
Evangelist: An Escaped Slave from the Southern States of America, 40 Years Resident in
Oldham (1914), details the wandering of Johnson on his arrival in Britain in December
1862 at the height of extreme unemployment and its attendant misery:
I was worse now than ever – cotton stockings and a pair of slippers in bleak December,
friendless and homeless, roaming the streets of Liverpool. I walked over to Southport, and
finding nothing to do, walked by Ormskirk to St. Helens, on to Warrington, thence to Man-
chester; again on to Wigan, Huddersfield, Leeds, York, Beverley and Hull, where I took to
singing, dancing and rattlebones, which I found was easier than begging.53
James Johnson’s torturous wanderings through Northern England in December 1862 are
unremarkable for a working-class man seeking employment at the height of the Lanca-
shire Cotton Famine. Yet his sojourn was different and, despite the hardship, strangely lib-
erating, for he had played his part in the Civil War that had caused the embargo of cotton
which had created these awful conditions. An African American slave, escaping to Union
lines earlier in 1862, he had withdrawn his enforced labour from the Confederate cause
and had then travelled to Britain to ensure his freedom away from a country stained by
the ‘Peculiar Institution’. Finally settling in Oldham a few miles away, his brief autobiogra-
phy was published posthumously in 1914 by his Lancashire-born daughter and lay almost
completely unread until its rediscovery during the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave
trade commemorations in 2007. Such working-class black voices are rare in Victorian
Britain, especially beyond London, but their uncovering is vital to tell the fully nuanced
story of working-class and black people in Britain. His wanderings took him on roundtrips
of over 300 miles before he settled in Oldham. His description of himself without proper
shoes or woollen warmers in a harsh winter environment shows his desperate circum-
stances in what he was hoping was his promised land of freedom away from the slave-
infested American polity. For Johnson, vagrancy and extreme hunger in Britain did at
least have the sweet smell of freedom.
53
James Johnson, The Life of the Late James Johnson, Coloured Evangelist: An Escaped Slave from the Southern States of
America, 40 Years Resident in Oldham, England (Oldham: W. Galley, 1914), 13.
Autobiographical accounts, such as Johnson’s, interrupt lazy narratives of imperial

and mercantile glory that are over-reliant on great men theories of history. Through
a politicised dark tourism, their narratives can play a role in creating more dynamic,
radical models of historiography which are urgently needed in even the most con-
ventional of tourist sites. For it is the willingness to work through multiple chron-
ologies and to foreground multiple memorial standpoints that should guide us.
Michael Rothberg addresses the importance of attending to memory’s multiplicities,
describing how moving from essentialism, particularism, and competitive victimhood
between classes, races, and ethnicities can lead to richer and more politically astute
interpretations of our complex historical narratives and, I believe, work toward a
praxis that builds more sustainable local and national touristic narratives. He
describes how:
It is precisely that convoluted, sometimes historically unjustified, back and forth movement
of seemingly distant collective memories in and out of public consciousness that I qualify as
memory’s multidirectionality. […] Thinking of memory as multidirectional instead of
competitive does not entail dispensing with a notion of the urgency of memory, with its
life-and-death stakes. Rather these examples alert us to the need for a form of comparative
thinking that, like memory itself, is not afraid to traverse sacrosanct borders of ethnicity
or era.54
In other words, we should work for a memorial praxis that will never be satisfied with
unitary narratives (of any ideological persuasion) and be attuned to voices that will
make for a more inclusive and multiply defined historiography. For the warning from
history is always to be wary of its hegemonic tendencies and to promote heterogeneous
voices, especially from those who are currently, and have so often before, been excluded.
Reynolds: Philip Stone asks if present-day memorial sites are communicating historical
knowledge effectively to their visitors. Addressing the role of Holocaust memorials specifi-
cally, his comment sounds a note of considerable scepticism about their ability to convey
the historical complexities that gave rise to the Nazi genocide. For Stone, the problem with
memorial sites in dark tourism lies in the way they ‘disconnect a (tragic) past from the
(fretful) present for our (hopeful) future’. Instead of linking a violent past to unsettling
circumstances in the present, dark tourism commodifies history as an object we
consume as spectacle. To underscore his scepticism, Stone cites an article from The Guar-
dian by Jonathan Jones, who blames Holocaust memorials for failing to prevent the re-
emergence of a politically viable far right in Europe.55 If Holocaust memorials are
failing to realise their mission, often formulated in the imperative ‘Never again’, does
the fault lie with the dark tourists who consume them, or does the fault lie in the memor-
ials themselves?
The image of the frivolous tourist fooled by the inauthenticities of the tourism market is
a well-rehearsed trope in tourism studies, and much of dark tourism theory tends to reca-
pitulate it. One of my concerns about dark tourism theory is its tendency to focus on sites
instead of tourists, whom it tends to characterise as relatively undifferentiated consumers
54
Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2009), 17.
55
Jonathan Jones, ‘War Memorials Have Failed’, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2016/dec/
09/war-memorials-have-failed-peter-eisenman-holocaust (accessed May 24, 2018).
with a taste for the macabre.56 However, a demographic examination of the visitors to sites
of Holocaust remembrance, including longitudinal studies of the shifting makeup of tour-
ists over time, would quickly complicate that characterisation. As I write in Postcards from
Auschwitz, Holocaust tourists are too diverse in terms of nationality, religion, age, family
background, or education to permit such a generalised portrayal.57 Some visitors to
Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, for example, are vacationers on an
urban sight-seeing tour that itself may be configured along any number of themes:
Jewish Berlin, Nazi traces in Berlin, the city’s Cold War legacy, or its post-reunification
architectural landmarks. Some visitors to Holocaust memorials are individuals undertak-
ing a form of pilgrimage to honour victims who may have been part of one’s family. Others
are school groups on a mandatory visit, sometimes engaging in the kinds of mischief that
school outings typically invite. Given the variety of participants in Holocaust tourism, it
strikes me as impossible to draw any overarching conclusions about their commitment
to learning about history through tourism.
But even the most earnest tourist may encounter relatively little historical information
at a memorial installation. The abstract form of the some of the most prominent Holo-
caust memorials, including ones in Berlin and Vienna, appears to be fuelling Jones’s sus-
picion of their inefficacy.58 James E. Young has written extensively about these memorials
as counter-monuments, which are works of commemoration prevalent in Germany and
Austria that reject the heroic idiom of traditional monuments. Counter-monuments use
abstracted form and negative space (darkness, empty rooms, subterranean installations),
leaving it up to their visitors to determine their message. For Young, the debate over
meaning becomes a form of memory work that preserves debate about appropriate
ways to memorialise the Holocaust.
A recent controversy over tourists at the Berlin memorial illustrates the difficulty in
concluding that abstract memorials do not connect the past to the present. The
German-Israeli comedian and activist Shahak Shapira gathered photographs of irreverent
tourist behaviour at Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe that had been
posted on social media and, using digital editing software, superimposed the images
onto historical photos of the Holocaust. Instead of leaping among pillars, for example,
the disrespectful tourist appeared to be leaping over mounds of emaciated corpses.59
The media coverage of Shapira’s provocative intervention was extensive, and the individ-
uals depicted wrote apologetic requests to have their images removed from the site, to
which Shapira complied. Young’s point about debate over counter-monuments appears
correct: ‘The question of historical content begins at precisely the moment the question
of memorial design ends. Memory, which has followed history, will now be followed by
still further historical debate’.60
56
Lennon and Foley, Dark Tourism; Stone, ‘A Dark Tourism Spectrum’, 145–60. Stone’s typology is a welcome differentiation
among dark tourism sites, but for me calls into question the utility of the term itself.
57
Daniel P. Reynolds, Postcards from Auschwitz. Holocaust Tourism and the Meaning of Remembrance (New York: NYU Press,
2018).
58
Jones’s Guardian article faults Rachel Whiteread’s Judenplatz memorial in Vienna for its alleged reliance on abstraction,
though the monument is actually quite figurative in its representation of Jewish culture as a library whose books (and
culture generally) are lost to the present.
59
Shakak Shapira, ‘Yolocaust’, https://yolocaust.de (accessed June 1, 2018).
60
James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge. After-images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2000), 223.
The notion that memorials lack the capacity to inform visitors about historical com-
plexity only makes sense if one ignores the context in which such memorials function.
Tourism is but one modality by which we encounter the memory of the Holocaust, and
has to be understood as part of a complex web of efforts to educate the public about
the violence of hatred and bigotry. Dark tourism both informs and is informed by
other forms of cultural expression and knowledge production. Furthermore, memorials
have to be approached as aesthetic objects that engage affectively with the events they com-
memorate. As Saul Friedländer has written, Holocaust memory and Holocaust history are
separate enterprises.61 By situating their Holocaust memorials alongside or inside histori-
cal museums, the Holocaust memorials in Berlin, Vienna, Washington, Jerusalem, and
elsewhere typically engage in both memory and historiography. By linking aesthetic
expression with the historical accounts, these memorials work by appealing to one’s
sense of empathy and one’s rational understanding.
In Germany, researchers have begun to study what students learn when visiting sites of
memory, and the initial findings are encouraging.62 Ultimately, Holocaust memorials and
museums can educate and invite reflection, but there is no guarantee that historical knowl-
edge about intolerance can be realised as progressive political action in the present. Tes-
timony by tourists themselves suggest that such visits are deeply meaningful to them, but
how do we assess their subsequent political behaviour? There can be no control group for
testing the efficacy of Holocaust memory in affecting the present course of history, which
for all its parallels to the past, has to be understood for its own particularities. As Sander
Gilman, professor of history at Emory University, has recently said about Holocaust edu-
cation, ‘If you have a fantasy that that is going to be a kind of vaccination against hate,
that’s wonderfully naïve. The rise of anti-Semitism today has to do with situations
today’.63 Holocaust memorials may succeed or fail in elucidating the present through
the example of the past. What is certain, however, is that their presence on the dark tour-
ist’s itinerary is certainly preferable to their absence.
Hartmann: I would like to applaud Dr. Stone’s thoughtful response written in his unique,
evocative prose. Let me repeat one great sentence expressing what dark tourism is and/or
in the widest sense could be: ‘ … dark tourism symbolises sites of dissonant heritage, sites
of selected silences, sites rendered political and ideological, sites powerfully intertwined
with interpretation and meaning, and sites of the imaginary and the imagined’.
In the following I will use some of Stone’s words as a point of departure for my own
discussion contribution. I agree with his assertion of ‘dark tourism (being/becoming) a
multi-disciplinary field’. My question is how did this new field evolve? I argue that the
beginnings of the dark tourism studies tradition are closely tied to a network of tourism
researchers in Northern England and Southern Scotland whose work in the tourism
field was advanced and prospered through new employment opportunities in academe.
The uptick in higher education positions has to be seen in the context of the many lost
61
See Saul Friedländer, ‘History, Memory, and the Historian: Dilemmas and Responsibilities’, New German Critique, no. 80
(Spring-Summer 2000): 3-15.
62
Bert Pampel, Mit eigenen Augen sehen, wozu der Mensch fähig ist (Frankfurt a.M.: Campus Verlag, 2007); Elke Gryglewski,
Verena Haug, Gottfried Kößler, and Christa Schikorra, eds., Gedenkstättenädagogik: Kontext, Theorie und Praxis der Bildung-
sarbeit zu NS-Verbrechen (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2015).
63
Ari Feldman, ‘Is Jordan Petersen Enabling Jew Hatred’?, Forward, May 11, 2018, https://forward.com/news/national/
400597/is-jordan-petersen-enabling-jew-hatred/ (accessed May 26, 2018).
jobs in the de-industrialising local and regional economy of the 1970s to 1990s and the
merger or foundation of new colleges/universities as a hotbed for research of how to
bring back jobs in an economically depressed region. Employment in the services industry
including tourism services was frequently seen as a panacea for growth.
While the more favourable work conditions for academicians in general and for
tourism researchers in particular in the ‘old industrial North’ by the 1990s were important
factors that allowed for the development of new research foci, it does not explain a newly-
found inclination to shed light on the ‘dark side’ of humanity, as it expresses itself in
sought ‘dark tourism’ experiences. Here, we have to look at the environmental, cultural,
and social conditions for a regionally grounded appreciation of ‘darkness’. Is it purely inci-
dental that in 2018 subject matters of ‘dark landscapes’ are explored by geographers living
and working in Northern England and Southern Scotland?64 It happens to be the same
region which once provided the backdrop to the ‘dark tourism’ research tradition in the
mid-1990s/early and mid-2000s. Such parallels as well as the role of light conditions for
travel and tourism deserve to be examined in an in-depth study.
Stone writes about ‘dark tourism as (being) politically engineered and socially con-
structed’. An excellent example for his pertinent observation is the co-existence and cross-
over of ‘dark tourism’ and ‘red tourism’ at seismic memorial sites in the People’s Republic
of China. In 1976, more than 240 thousand people died due to the Tangshan earthquake.
Two different memorials are in place: one praising the efforts made by the Communist
Party of China (CPC) to overcome the tragedy and the other one commemorating at
last the dead, with thousands of names posted on a memorial wall.65 A more recent earth-
quake catastrophe that claimed more than 60 thousand lives is the Wenchuan Earthquake
of 2008. Here, four memorial parks and museums were established over the past ten years,
sites which have received visitation in the form of ‘dark tourism’66 and ‘red tourism’ gen-
erated by government and party organisations to uphold a ‘shaken authority’ of the CPC.67
Stone talks in his retrospective comments about ‘the propensity for secular, death-
related travel which continues today’ and – I wish to add – in the future. This leads me
to ask the question: What is the future of dark tourism?
Two new types of attractions denoting the dark heritage of humanity will most likely
proliferate: a) sites where humans extinguished other life forms on earth such as the
great mammoth and b) sites associated with the human displacement of our homo
sibling, the Neanderthal Man (homo sapiens neanderthalensis). Both will contribute to
our understanding of the destructive nature of our species (homo sapiens sapiens).
The Rouffignac Cave in Southwest France is remarkable as it has more than 250 rep-
resentations of animal themes which date back to 13,000 to 14,000 BP. The most dominant
depiction is that of the mammoth, with about 150 paintings and edgings typical of
64
Nick Dunn and Tim Edensor, ‘Dark Landscapes: New Forms of Experience and Place’ (Sessions 1 and 2 at annual meeting
of the Association of American Geographers (AAG), New Orleans, April 13, 2018). These sessions included contributors
from the University of Central Lancashire, Lancaster University, Manchester Metropolitan University, the University of
Edinburgh, and the University of Glasgow.
65
Shengrong Chen and Honggang Xu, ‘From Fighting Against Death to Commemorating the Dead at Tangshan Earthquake
Heritage Sites’, Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 15, no. 8 (August 2017): 1–22.
66
Yong Tang, ‘Dark Tourism to Seismic Memorial Sites’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies, 423–41; Yong
Tang, ‘Contested Narratives at the Hanwang Earthquake Memorial Park: Where Ghost Industrial Town and Seismic Mem-
orial Meet’, Geoheritage, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12371-018-0309-9 (accessed July 8, 2018).
67
Christian P. Sorace, Shaken Authority: China’s Communist Party and the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2017).
Franco-Cantabrian art.68 While it seems that the mammoth had symbolic significance in
the Cro-Magnon culture (late upper Magdalenian period), it has been argued that
advanced human hunters contributed to the disappearance of these great animals at a
time period when climate conditions and the vegetation cover underwent significant
changes around 10,000 BP. Soon after, the mammoth became extinct in Europe, with
the last surviving mammoth species, mammuthus primigenius, recorded in a remote
part of Eastern Siberia four thousand years ago. Rouffignac is also the site of rhinoceros
depictions, a species now fighting for survival in Central/Eastern Africa. I predict, that
with the greater knowledge we will gain about the destructive, life-ending processes our
species has been involved in, this dark side of humanity will be featured at Rouffignac
and many other sites for visitation.
Last but not least, it is the coexistence of homo sapiens sapiens and of homo sapiens
neanderthalensis over a three to five thousand year period 40–45 thousand years ago
that has triggered many speculations regarding how the displacement of the Nean-
derthal Man by humans in the southwestern region of Europe may have happened
(including violence).69 While recent genetic research has shown that at some point
in human history modern human beings and the Neanderthal Man intermingled and
interbred,70 we are still in the ‘dark’ about how our homo sibling attempted to
survive in a hostile environment. Was it through assimilation and ultimately absorption
by the more numerous humans or did it come about through a greater aggression
shown by homo sapiens sapiens in securing shelter (caves) and limited food resources
(animals & plants)? This troubling, still evolving chapter about the extinction of our
‘close relative’ around 39,000 BP will be certainly featured at sites associated with
the Neanderthal Man, at existing sites like the Neander Valley near Düsseldorf,
Germany, and new ‘dark tourism’ sites as research results about other fossil findings
become available.
Stone: concluding thoughts

Dark tourism is an academic appellation given to exploring tourist sites of significant
‘other’ death and the culturally important dead. Yet, despite a long history of people visit-
ing sites of death, contemporary dark tourism evokes notions of mass ‘dark tourist’ hordes
that may learn little from heritage that hurts. The idea of a so-called ‘dark tourist’ raises
issues of emergent motivations and experiences of visitors consuming touristic traumas-
capes. However, semantic insinuations of ‘darkness’ in dark tourism simply render the
tourist to a reductionist, if not macabre, leisure seeker who is somehow deficient in requi-
site morals, historic comprehension, and cultural codes, and who possesses an innate
inability to be elucidated by memorial messages. All-too-common scholarly tropes of
tourism responding to manufactured stimulus and, more importantly, tourists as funda-
mentally gullible passive consumers of packaged experiences is simply an indolent
68
Jean-Claude Blanchet and Jean-Jacques Cleyet-Merle, Les Eyzies de Tayac et la vallee de la Vezere (Paris: Editions du Patri-
moine, 2005).
69
Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (New York, NY: Harper Collins,
1992).
70
David Reich, Who We are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (New York: Pantheon
Books, 2018); Jared Diamond, ‘Origin Story: New Genetic Evidence Offers Surprising Revelations about Our Ancient Ances-
tors’, The New York Times Book Review, April 22, 2018, 11.
argument.71 Notwithstanding utility of the term and its contentions, as Reynolds points
out, to categorise diverse people who visit sites associated with pain or shame as dark –
and perhaps in some way deviant – is not only misleading, it is fruitless as a typological
exercise.72 In other words, ‘there can never be a so-called “dark tourist” as a defined tax-
onomy because to consume tourism is to consume experiences’.73
Consequently, I suggest there is no such thing as a ‘dark’ tourist in dark tourism – only
people engaged in the historic and social reality of their life-worlds. As David Simpson
suggests, ‘if indeed we are living with the forgetting of history – one of the standard
assumptions of the postmodern – then even the possibility of a serious reckoning with
dark [tourism] sites might go some way toward correcting our myopia’.74 Furthermore,
it matters little if agreement cannot be reached amongst the intelligentsia of what is or
what is not dark in dark tourism. Arguably, what matters more is scholarly recognition
of difficult heritage sites that seek to interpret historic cultural trauma that perturbs our
collective consciousness. It is here that the tourist experience becomes paramount,
rather than initial commitment of learning tragic history through tourism encounters.
It is perhaps, therefore, less important to focus upon motives of why people participate
in dark tourism but, rather, focus on emergent corollaries of the tourist experience.
Hence, questions of how, why, and where particular cultural trauma is remembered and
experienced within the visitor economy remain at the crux of dark tourism scholarship.
This round table discussion has sought to illuminate some of these questions, particularly
those focused on dark tourism as both concept and historical practice, as well as bringing
into focus broader processes of memorialisation and memory multiplicities. If difficult
heritage is the production and presentation of tragic history, then dark tourism is the con-
sumption and experience of that history. In turn, dark tourism becomes an institution of
mortality mediation where co-creation of meaning between heritage-producer and
tourist-consumer is made. It is within this intersection of heritage and tourism that
meaning-making dichotomies in learning, interpretation, and traumatic (his)stories are
exposed. Thus, after my previous remarks of memorial efficacy, John Lennon offers a criti-
cal insight of dark tourism within a meaning-making process of evidence and education.
Highlighting the Cambodian genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s,
Lennon outlines inherent issues of dissonant heritage and a selective recall of the genocidal
past. However, while he recognises broader implications of intergenerational learning, the
transmission of tragic history through tourism, as well as identity and political narratives,
cross-cultural aspects and Western biases of dark tourism are also important. In short, the
boom in Cambodian memorials within the context of international tourism, combined
with a distinct lack of perpetrator prosecution and conflicted politics of reconciliation,
means that ‘Killing Fields’ sites are often (re)presented to Western tourists as evidence
of atonement and remembrance of victims.75 Yet, the apparent tourist experience that
71
Dean MacCannell, The Ethics of Sightseeing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
72
Philip R. Stone, ‘The “Dark Tourist” Experience’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism; Philip R. Stone and Richard
Sharpley, ‘Deviance, Dark Tourism and “Dark Leisure”: Towards a (Re)configuration of Morality and the Taboo in
Secular Society’, in Contemporary Perspectives in Leisure: Meanings, Motives and Lifelong Learning, ed. Sam Elkington
and Sean Gammon (Abington, Oxon: Routledge, 2013), 54–64.
73
Stone, ‘The “Dark Tourist” Experience’, 510.
74
David Simpson, review of Death Tourism, edited by Brigitte Sion, Critical Quarterly 59, no. 1 (April 2017): 141.
75
Brigitte Sion, ‘Conflicting Sites of Memory in Post-genocide Cambodia’, Humanity: An International Journal of Human
Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 2, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 1–21; Cathlin Goulding, ‘Living with Ghosts, Living
is ‘evidential, commemorative and educational’ is played out against a Buddhist doctrine

of karma, ancestor worship, and ritual, and a fundamental difference in the theology of
death and soteriology of the main Asian religious traditions.76 Therefore, multiple and
contested difficult heritage narratives are both produced and consumed at these visitor
memorial sites and, as Lennon reminds us, these chronicles are embedded within ideologi-
cal interests that are never neutral.
This lack of neutrality is a theme highlighted by Alan Rice in his perceptive account of
Williamson Park, Lancaster, UK. Williamson Park (an area I know well) offers contem-
porary visitors a romantic rural idyll carved out of urbanity, and directly from the
mind-set of Victorian elites. Against backdrops of a far-away Civil War, local famine
and national industrial strife, the bucolic landscape and botanical gardens of Williamson
Park are essentially built upon foundations of social misery. As centrepiece to the park, the
resplendent if not prodigal memorial from Lord Ashton in the shape of Ashton Memorial
(to his dead wife) dominates the landscape both literally and figuratively. However, as Rice
elucidates, the memorial occludes minority histories of the working classes and black
populace that are hidden if not forbidden and, thus, tourism to the park disseminates a
memorial message that is only partially told. Consequently, Rice calls for a more politically
astute dark tourism that, in this case, addresses lazy narratives of imperial and mercantile
glory. It is here that memorial efficacy is once again called into question within the visitor
economy, as radical and inclusive models of historiography are urgently required at dark
tourism sites. Otherwise, as Rice quite rightly advocates, touristic memorials will render
any warning from history to prevailing hegemonic tendencies and, subsequently, stage
memorials that exclude minority voices and victims.
Daniel Reynolds raises issues of memorial hegemony and affective design in his reply
about dark tourism commodifying history as objects of spectacle. Specifically, Reynolds
notes my scepticism of whether artistically abstract memorials that require inventive
and cultural decoding adequately convey commemorative messages to the masses.
However, with co-creating meaning processes inherent within dark tourism, the issue
of creative abstraction, ‘relational architecture’ and counter-monumentalism – or even
anti-monumentalism77 – is perhaps more about conserving difficult heritage debates
than commemorating the dead. If this is the case, then the tragic dead are kept alive at
provocative memory sites whereby imaginative renditions of trauma intersect with the
mass visitor economy. It is here that Reynolds notes ‘irreverent and disrespectful tourist
behaviour’ at such sites, though such behaviour should be tempered with broader
notions of moral relativism. Indeed, Simpson argues in the case of dark tourism that
‘no one, even when faced with a landscape of gift shops and cafeterias, parked buses
and crowds with cameras and selfie-sticks, should be presumed incapable of respectful
behaviour and serious meditation’.78 Yet, by using Shahak Shapira’s ‘Yolocuast’ controver-
sial art demonstration, in which certain (seemingly misbehaving) tourists are essentially
blackmailed via social media exposure, Reynolds suggests Berlin’s Memorial to the
Otherwise: Pedagogies of Haunting in Post-genocide Cambodia’, in (Re)constructing Memory: Education, Identity, and
Conflict, ed. James H. Williams and Michelle J. Bellino (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2017), 241–68.
76
Erik Cohen, ‘Thanatourism: A Comparative Approach’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies, 157–71.
77
Rafael Lozana-Hemmer, ‘Alien Relationships from Public Space’, interview by Alex Adriaansens and Joke Brouwer, in
TransUrbanism (Rotterdam: V2_Publishing, 2002), 155.
78
Simpson, review of Death Tourism, 141.
Murdered Jews of Europe is a counter-monument that requires pre-conditioning of tour-

ists in order for it to inform historical complexities of the Holocaust. Arguably, therefore,
leaving memorials within dark tourism to artistic abstraction may mean any aesthetic
expression is simply that – an expression of the art rather than affective empathy with
the memorial message. That said, however, Reynolds rightly argues that despite intrinsic
complexities of difficult heritage, and regardless of memorial design and its semiotics, the
presence of memorials within dark tourism is preferable to their absence. In so doing,
Reynolds reminds us that memory management within dark tourism involves a constella-
tion of meanings, memories, emotions, and narratives. To that end, memorials matter, but
it is our use of them within dark tourism that will make them matter – for better or worse.
The idea of ‘for better or worse’ is a final point raised by Rudi Hartmann in his various
remarks. In his discourse of conceptual overlap between ‘dark’ and ‘red’ tourism, Hart-
mann notes earthquake disasters in China have witnessed memorials that are imbued
with commemoration as well as Communist encounters with the dead. Certainly, recent
mass visitations to quake sites in China suggest a form of ‘phoenix tourism’ is occurring.79
Therefore, instead of locating tourism within the context of economic regeneration in a
post-disaster, tourism is located in a social and political milieu – in this case,
Communism – and memorials espouse disaster stewardship, party political power, and
a Communist mantra. However, Hartmann ends on a prophetic note of humankind’s
destructive tendencies. Indeed, these destructive tendencies are often the stuff of dark
tourism, and history is stuffed with destructive events. The ‘dark side of humanity’,
according to Hartmann at least, will fuel the future of dark tourism and guarantee a
‘dark past’ ripe for consumerism.80
Nevertheless, despite these cautionary forewarnings, this round table discussion has
sought to shine light on dark tourism. Ultimately, dark tourism scholarship bridges the
link between difficult heritage and its consumption within the broader visitor economy.
Tourists as potential ‘makers of historical knowledge’ means that touristic experiences
bear witness to the tragic past as well dispense knowledge in the present-day.81 It is
here that a new willingness to question historical narratives and interrogate processes of
remembrance has emerged. Dealing with the difficult past is an arduous and contested
process, and one that cannot be solved through simple erection of monuments – abstract
or otherwise. Instead, dark tourism should embody processes of collective memory and
meaning making, whereby visitor sites serve as affective places of functional interaction
and sensible dialogue. If that is the case, then dark tourism and concomitant experiences
of memorials and monuments will be a starting position, rather than an end point, for
society’s critical engagement with its painful past.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
79
Senija Causevic and Paul Lynch, ‘Phoenix Tourism: Post-conflict Tourism Role’, Annals of Tourism Research 38, no. 3 (July
2011): 780-800.
80
D.W. Wright, ‘Hunting Humans: A Future for Tourism in 2200’, Futures 78–79 (April–May 2016): 34–46; D.W. Wright,
‘Terror Park: A Future Theme Park in 2100’, Futures 96 (November 2017): 1–22.
81
Daniel P. Reynolds, ‘Consumers or Witnesses? Holocaust Tourists and the Problem of Authenticity’, Journal of Consumer
Culture 16, no. 2 (July 2016): 334–53.
Notes on contributors
Rudi Hartmann is a Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences at the
University of Colorado Denver. His research interests include heritage tourism, ecotourism, and
sustainable tourism planning. Hartmann is the author of numerous essays about heritage
tourism and Holocaust tourism, and he is a co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Dark
Tourism Studies.
John Lennon is the Director of the Moffat Centre for Travel and Tourism Business Development at
Glasgow Caledonian University. He has undertaken over 500 tourism and travel projects in over 35
nations, including major projects on behalf of the private sector and public sector clients. Lennon is
also the author of over 80 articles and five books on the travel and tourism industry, including Dark
Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster, co-authored with Malcolm Foley.
Daniel P. Reynolds is Seth Richards Professor in Modern Languages in the German Department at
Grinnell College. His past publications include articles on modernist, postcolonial, and contempor-
ary German literature. Reynolds has done extensive research on tourism at Nazi extermination and
concentration camps, deportation memorials, museums, and other commemorative sites of the
Holocaust, and he is the author of Postcards from Auschwitz: Holocaust Tourism and the
Meaning of Remembrance.
Alan Rice is a Professor in English and American Studies in the School of Humanities and Social
Sciences at the University of Central Lancashire. He is an expert in the field of the ’Black Atlantic’,
and his scholarship has led to collaborative projects with museums and community organisations.
Rice has published numerous articles and essays about the legacy of slavery, as well as books like
Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic and Creating Memorials, Building Identities: The Politics
of Memory in the Black Atlantic.
Adam T. Rosenbaum is an Associate Professor of History at Colorado Mesa University in Grand
Junction, Colorado. He is the author of Bavarian Tourism and The Modern World, 1800–1950, and
is currently working on his second book project, an expansive history of travel from mass
migrations to mass tourism. Rosenbaum serves as the Associate Editor of the Journal of Tourism
History.
Philip R. Stone is the Executive Director of the Institute for Dark Tourism Research at the Univer-
sity of Central Lancashire. He has an extensive commercial background within the UK private
sector, as well as a PhD in Thanatology. Stone has published extensively in the area of dark
tourism and heritage. He is the co-author of The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice
of Dark Tourism (with Richard Sharpley), the editor of Current Issues in Dark Tourism Research,
and the editor-in-chief of The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies.

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Journal of Tourism History

ISSN: 1755-182X (Print) 1755-1838 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjth20

The history of dark tourism

Rudi Hartmann, John Lennon, Daniel P. Reynolds, Alan Rice, Adam T.

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1755182X.2018.1545394

Published online: 16 Nov 2018.

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The history of dark tourism

Adam T. Rosenbaum: editor’s introduction

CONTACT Adam T. Rosenbaum arosenba@coloradomesa.edu

simultaneously become part of the visitor experience. However, equally important in

In commemorating sites of African Atlantic presence it behoves us to be very careful not to

Central Lancashire. Pioneers in UK tourism studies such as John Urry (Lancaster

Philip R. Stone: comment

UK (and was globally exported), and which continues to provide thought-leadership.

problematic. Operators of tourist attractions that constitute a major learning experience

Autobiographical accounts, such as Johnson’s, interrupt lazy narratives of imperial

Stone: concluding thoughts

is ‘evidential, commemorative and educational’ is played out against a Buddhist doctrine

Murdered Jews of Europe is a counter-monument that requires pre-conditioning of tour-

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