“Post-viral tourism’s antagonistic tourist imaginaries”

Purpose – This paper aims to examine the antagonistic coexistence of different tourism imaginaries in global post-viral social landscapes. Such antagonisms may be resolved at the expense of the ethics of tourism mobility, if not adjudicated by post-human reflexivity. Currently, unreflexive behaviours involve the refusal to conform to lifesaving ‘‘stay-at-home’’ policies, the tendency to book holidays and the public inspection of death zones.

Design/methodology/approach – Each of the consumption styles explored in this paper to discuss post-COVID-19 tourism recovery corresponds to at least one tourist imaginary, antagonistically placed against social imaginaries of moral betterment, solidarity, scientific advancement, national security and labour equality. A multi-modal collection of audio-visual and textual data, gathered through social media and the digital press, is categorised and analysed via critical discourse analysis.

Findings – Data in the public domain suggest a split between pessimistic and optimistic attitudes that forge different tourism futures. These attitudes inform different imaginaries with different temporal orientations and consumption styles.

Social implications – COVID-has exposed the limits of the capacity to efficiently address threats to both human and environmental ecosystems. As once popular tourist locales/destinations are turned by COVID-2019s spread into risk zones with morbid biographical records their identities alter and their imaginaries of suffering become anthropocentric.

Originality/value – Using Castoriadis’ differentiation between social and radical imaginaries, Foucault’s biopolitical analysis, Sorokin’s work on mentalities and Sorel’s reflections on violence, the author argue that this paper has entered a new phase in the governance and experience of tourism, which subsumes the idealistic basis of tourist imaginaries as cosmopolitan representational frameworks under the technocultural imperatives of risk, individualistic growth through the adventure (‘‘edgework’’) and heritage preservation. This paper also needs to reconsider the contribution of technology (not technocracy) to sustainable post-COVID-19 scenarios of tourism recovery.