Not Tourism Worldmaking: A Critical Dialogue with Hollinshead and Vellah on Post-Covid-19 Sensible Entanglements

Hollinshead proclaimed tourism worldmaking as the creative/imaginative and often false/faux processes that management agencies and mediating bodies use to favor particular representations of places and people. While this remains valid at an organizational level, the COVID-19 pandemic has radically (and maybe also hopefully) changed the very regimes of sensory apprehension on which tourism is based, thus also suggesting that we rethink the worldmaking aspects of its postindustrial creation (rather than production and consumption chains). Considering some recent discussions on what may happen to tourism after the end of the pandemic I claim that: 1) we should begin by reassessing the realm of the sensible, 2) talk more about “travel worldmaking”, and 3) reconsider the centrality of the traveler’s emotional work during world travels. The thesis develops at the intersection of the “must” (urgency to sustain), the “ought” (call to respect), and the “desire” (drive to enjoy). It calls for a reassessment of worldmaking agency as a structured form of action, which gestures towards a durable change in sensible entanglements between humans and the world. I engage in a critical collegial dialogue with Hollinshead and Vellah’s thesis that tourism as a postcolonial or postindustrial moment per se contributes to postidentity. Instead, I argue that after the COVID-19 event (among other viral worldmaking events threatening to eliminate humanity), world travelers resort to what is deemed accessible through their sensory capabilities within structured conditions. Tourism is thus also reimagined at a sensible level separately from the organizational/institutional processes that Hollinshead and Vellah placed center stage in their thesis.