Theatricality, Dark Tourism and Ethical Spectatorship: Absent Others by Emma Willis (review)

This past January, to mark the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the BBC released hauntingly lovely footage shot by a drone delicately swooping through the site of the former death camp. That very week, I received my review copy of Emma Willis’s book, with its cover depicting a supple nude rapturously arced atop a stepladder. The photo is from Willis’s own 2007 Dark Tourists, featuring dancer/choreographer Malia Johnson aesthetically embodying trauma in a desire to bear witness to it. Each of these cases demonstrates the provocative, contrapuntal kind of pleasure when objects of beauty serve as vehicles for remembering or making sense of atrocity. Herein lies the seduction of dark tourism, the subject of Willis’s excellent study, which interrogates the ethics of attractions and performances that proffer powerful emotional experience as an appropriate way to respond to human tragedy, ecological disaster, or historic economic injustice.

Willis is one of a growing number of scholars who seek the positive in dark tourism, after a wave of more cynical critics found fault in the touristic capitalization on rubberneckers’ desire for the macabre, or for “personal value” from the sidelines of “the pain of others,” as Susan Sontag termed it (20–21). For cynics, dark tourism’s very theatricality is what makes its attractions bankrupt exercises in base prosthetic memory. In her own investigation, however, informed in particular by the work of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, Willis found in the same theatricality and spectatorship “a desire to connect, to be involved, to understand and to feel at these sites,” prompting her to ask: “How could such spectatorship be redeemed … if at all?” (4).

To begin to get at an answer, Willis juxtaposes theatre pieces that deal with trauma and violence with her own accounts of being a cultural tourist at sites that do the same kind of work. Memorials at Khmer Rouge prisons and the Killing Fields in Cambodia, for instance, are coupled with Catherine Filloux’s 1998 play about two of the victims, Photographs from S-21. Genocide tourism in Rwanda finds resonance with Eric Ehn’s 2008 Maria Kizito, a contemplation of the nun found guilty in aiding and abetting one of the massacres there. And Willis compares visits to death camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau with Jerzy Grotowski’s Akropolis. These sites and performances, she writes, are “indictments of human failure” (16) and serve as “both a memorial act and an attempt to understand the other’s experience through embodying it” (7).

Willis is not interested in whether the particular projects she examines “fail or succeed” (48), but rather in confronting the reader with her “speculations.” Like tourists ourselves, we are at times left to our own devices to make sense of them (as her Polish tour guide told her group at Auschwitz). At others, perhaps, we can only experience the examples along with a collective body of fellow reader-witnesses (ibid.). Indeed, the reader is framed as a dark tourist, starting with the cover, as well as the introduction, titled “Notes for the Traveller,” which offers a valuable primer on tourism scholarship by cultural and performance scholars. The reader necessarily accesses the case studies through Willis’s carefully articulated subject position; she accounts for her own outsider status at each site, and we are complicit with her outsiderness, confused and often “at a loss” along with her.

Willis finds, for instance, a blurring of tourist desire, personal witness, and state-sanctioned narratives in the Vietnam War experience at Cu Chi in chapter 3, which offers visitors a chance to crawl through Vietcong tunnels and shoot their guns. She surmises, with evidence, that her tour guide invented, or at least “finessed,” his counternarrative to that of his employers, and that his own personal story of trauma, tears and all, was a bid for better tips (111, 117). The Braveheart-inspired Māori reenactment spectacular Lost in Our Own Land in New Zealand may not at first seem to deliver redemption...