Revisualising township tourism in the Western Cape: the Migrant Labour Museum and the re-construction of Lwandle

Abstract

This article uses a case study of the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum, 40 km outside of Cape Town, to discuss how places and their histories come to be reconstituted in and along tourist routes. It argues that responsible tourism cannot merely be analysed through a hosts/guests approach that relies upon investigating impacts. This formulation does not take into account the fundamental ways that tourism is always about appropriation, systems of knowledge production, and the making of signs and values. The ways that Lwandle has been re-visualised suggests that it is much more useful to consider how places, people, cultures and histories are made and re-made in an image economy. The vast visual apparatus of tourism, depictions of place through writers, travellers and officials, gender relations, allocation of resources, claims to expertise, local and national politics, institutional arrangements and previous histories of images, are powerful mechanisms in the establishment, production and circulation of visual tourist knowledge. The journey constructed through Lwandle's past is one through a visual economy in which images are made, contested, altered and sometimes remain firmly in place.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 12 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.