Cultural Events as Symbolic Infrastructure: Repositioning African Destinations in the Global Tourism Imaginary
Keywords:
African festivals, carnivals, cultural events, event tourism, symbolic infrastructureAbstract
The paper reconceptualises episodic African tourism events such as carnivals and festivals through the lens of symbolic infrastructure. This has the capability of repositioning the destinations in the global tourism imaginary. Although much research on African festivals has received little attention, especially the available research has been more on African festivals, and their effect on the economy, visitor satisfaction, and community deliverables, yet little attention has been directed towards their effectiveness in forging the African representational position in the global tourism hierarchy. The concept of symbolic infrastructure is formulated by this review through the andragogy of the cultural political economy, post-colonial theory, symbolic capital, and soft power literature in elucidating the process through which carnivals operate as narrators working towards the production of symbolic capital, the spread of alternative imaginaries, and destination legitimacy. The paper proposes that African carnivals disrupt deep-rooted discourses of deficit that plague the continent with the vectors of poverty, crisis, and wildlife essentialism. These events develop cosmopolitan, creative, and modern identities, which mediate around epistemic marginalisation in tourism systems of knowledge through performative spectacle, mediated circulation, and aesthetic production. By changing the analytical perspective to the representational power, the paper adds to the discussions on tourism imaginaries and Global South agency and cultural sovereignty related to destination promotion. The carnival is consequently re-positioned as a strategic symbolic infrastructure that re-forms the visibility, legitimacy, and soft power of Africa in the global tourism governance.
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