1st Edition
Heritage in the Digital Era Cinematic Tourism and the Activist Cause
What happens to traditional conceptions of heritage in the era of fluid media spaces? ‘Heritage’ usually involves intergenerational transmission of ideas, customs, ancestral lands, and artefacts, and so serves to reproduce national communities over time. However, media industries have the power to transform national lands and histories into generic landscapes and ideas through digital reproductions or modifications, prompting renegotiations of belonging in new ways. Contemporary media allow digital environments to function as transnational classrooms, creating virtual spaces of debate for people with access to televised, cinematic and Internet ideas and networks.
This book examines a range of popular cinematic interventions that are reshaping national and global heritage, across Europe, Asia, the Americas and Australasia. It examines collaborative or adversarial articulations of such enterprise (by artists, directors, producers but also local, national and transnational communities) that blend activism with commodification, presenting new cultural industries as fluid but significant agents in the production of new public spheres.
Heritage in the Digital Era will appeal to students and scholars of sociology, film studies, tourist studies, globalization theory, social theory, social movements, human/cultural geography, and cultural studies.
1. Rethinking Heritage: Cultural Industries and Global Kin 2. Heritage Entropy? Cinematic Pilgrimage in New Zealand (2010) 3. The Da Vinci ‘Node’: Networks of Neo-Pilgrimage in the European Cosmopolis (2006-2008) 4. Projecting European Heritage: Acropolis in Ruins (2009) 5. Memory and Protest: Yimou Zhang’s and Ai Weiwei’s Artwork (2004-2011) 6. From Deep Ecology to Thick Description: Avatar’s (2009) ‘Cosmology of Protest’. Bibliography
Biography
Rodanthi Tzanelli is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Leeds. Her interests centre on globalization, cosmopolitanism, identity, media and tourism. She has published five books, including The Cinematic Tourist: Explorations in globalization, culture and resistance (2007) and Cosmopolitan Memory in Europe’s ‘Backwaters’: Rethinking civility (2011).
‘They are an interesting and stimulating series of choices. I like the way that the tendency towards focussing on expensive mega-epics is balanced by a romantic comedy. It is a good model for others to follow in this field… this is an interesting book for those wanting to explore the geopolitics of modern film productions.’
Warwick Frost (2015): Heritage in the digital era: cinematic tourism and the activist cause, Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events, DOI: 10.1080/19407963.2015.1043773
Article Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19407963.2015.1043773
