Gazed and subdued? Spectacle, spatial order and identity in the contested city

Bibliographic Data

ID12697474
AuthorsBree T Hocking (Open University, UK, corresponding author)
Year2015
Volume16
Issue4
Pages367-385
Publication date2015-12-10
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTourist Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1468-7976 • E-ISSN: 1741-3206
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/1468797615618124
OpenAlexW2556114459
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited16

From 2012–2013, Northern Ireland was rocked by loyalist protests over limits placed on flying the British flag at Belfast City Hall. The sometimes-violent manifestations were roundly condemned by officials and business leaders as an assault on ‘Brand Northern Ireland’, a threat to the province’s reputation as a successful model of post-conflict reconciliation and reconstruction. Accordingly, this article revises and updates Goffman’s concept of ‘a veneer of consensus’ to show how new regimes of political repression are inaugurated in the name of ‘tourism’. With the tourist gaze invoked by local officials as both neutral arbiter and economic imperative, the protests are subsequently assessed as a form of power negotiation, whereby symbolic contestation over the right to define the image of place in both physical and virtual spaces assumed an intensely political role

Aesthetics · Identity (music · Media studies · Narrative · Negotiation · Order (exchange · Place Branding · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Reputation · Sociology · Spectacle · Symbolic power · Tourism · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Irish and British Studies · Law · Religious Tourism and Spaces

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