What’s Left to Say? Late Modern Ruminations on Tourism and Critical Social Theory

While we maintain that ‘The tourism experience remains an important field through which to interrogate theory’ (Minca & Oakes, 2014, p. 294), as we re-read in 2022 our initial essay entitled ‘Tourism, modernity and postmodernity’, we realise how far we all are now from discussions on the postmodern in relation to different interpretations of modernity and the modern that dominated key humanities and social science debates in the 1990s. That essay was very much an attempt to precisely connect those debates to tourism studies, and possibly to all formulations of travel theory associated with the study of modernity's tensions, ambivalence, and paradoxes. Today, no one ever mentions the postmodern. That powerful turn in social theory is a thing of the past, although its long-term impact certainly is not. Quite the contrary. The fast but intense ‘postmodern season’ in the social sciences and humanities has in many ways opened the door, or at least prepared the ground, for the development of several other ‘turns’ that will be at the core of academic debates and perspectives in the decades to come. In this very brief chapter, then, we will sketch out some of these and offer our thoughts on how and why questions about late modernity and modern theory remain relevant in tourism studies today. Our focus lies with developments that emerged from critical interrogations with, as well as responses to, post/modernity in social theory during the 2010s in particular. These have included increasing attention to tourist practice (as opposed to more representational and symbolic dimensions of tourism), biopolitics, and a deepening interest in materiality and post-human approaches. We find an increasing convergence of the biopolitical and the technopolitical in tourism practice, and suggest that, arguably, critiques of the modernist rationality underlying the ongoing commodification, securitisation and even colonisation of bodies via tourism are now as important as ever.