The Hispanic Post-Colonial Tourist

The Hispanic Post-Colonial Tourist Jaume Marti-Olivella Allegheny College The Transnational Subject as Post-Colonial Tourist In this paper I want to bring together my critical interests in the fields of Feminism, Hispanism and Cultural Studies. ' More specifically, I want to argue the creation of a new narrative figure, what I will term the "transnational subject" which, if seen from the perspective of post-colonial studies becomes a new site to articulate the historical and narratological tension between the old metropolis and new decentered cultutal locations . I will focus on the ongoing trend among women writers from the Hispanic world to deconstruct popular narrative genres which have been traditionally dominated by male authors. This trend constitutes a parodie rewriting of some of the "foundational fictions" that established the (male) national subject, as Doris Sommer has so persuasively argued.2 My goal in this essay is to contextualize this new Hispanic feminism and its textual politics against the patriarchal consolidation of those national subjects. Quite consistently, these writers create characters who are "travellers ," who ate separated, both factually and/or imaginatively, from their desired others. It is this "travelling condition" that is central to my study since it produces a new narrative figure, that of the "post-colonial tourist " or the "transnational subject." To analyze this figure requires a critical shift from the ongoing process of textual decolonization of traditional Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 1, 1997 24 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies travel narratives and colonial chronicles in order to focus our critical gaze on the most important form of travel today: tourism. In the Iberian and the Latin American contexts, the role tourism has played in the socioeconomic transformation of society is an obvious one. Much less obvious, however, is the significance of tourism as an important factor in the process of (trans) national refiguration in our countries. A different and yet quite relevant question is to ask if tourism, both intellectual and recreational , becomes a multicultural practice of ideological and narratological significance. Or, to say it in Homi Bhabha's terms, if our transnational narratives ate not destabilizing the traditional "location of culture."3 The work of Carme Riera, Mercedes Abad and Ana Lydia Vega constitutes an illustration of such "an innovative site of collaboration and contestation" (Bhabha 2) In what follows I will study the parodie gestures of these three leading voices in the new Hispanic feminism, as a contestation of the foundational romantic fictions of their patriarchal predecessors. Before beginning my textual analysis, however, I would like to establish mote death/ the theotetical connections between tourism as a social practice and its narrative consttuction in the context of other postcolonial strategies. Interestingly enough, tourism has already generated a considerable amount of analytical literature in the social sciences. And yet, it has received far less attention from the fields of post-colonial and Cultural Studies. Most studies on the subject have been devoted to early travel writings, from the Spanish so-called "conquest" of the Americas to the British "imperial travelogues" of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries . Instead, I want to suggest that tourism has become the contemporary privileged scenario of the "colonial encounter," or, as Mary Louise Pratt has it: of "the contact zone."4 Briefly put, my contention is that tourism constitutes the most salient aspect of a neo-colonial situation, that is, the massive exploitation of natural and/or cultural resources of the so-called Second and Third Worlds by members of the so-called First World. This consideration is both highly contested and widely echoed by many statements coming from sociological and anthropological studies of tourism. Dennison Nash's essay on "Tourism as a Form of Imperialism " offers one of its clearest formulations: If productivity is the key to tourism, then any analysis of touristic development without reference to productive centers that generate tourist needs and tourists is bound to be incomplete. Such metropolitan centers have varying degrees of control over the nature of tourism and its development, but they exercise it—at least at the beginning of their relationship with tourist Jaume MartÃ--Olivella 25 areas—in alien regions. It is this power over touristic and related developments...