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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Politics of Dark Tourism: The Case of Cromañón and ESMA, Buenos Aires, Argentina

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Tourism has been recently catalogued as a key global industry (Shaw et al. 1990; Buckley and Witt, 1990; Lee and Chang, 2008). The influx of visitors not only potentially revitalises cultural resources but also generates economic resources of specific destinations. Recently, even spaces of mass-death or disasters such as Ground Zero in New York (9/11 terrorist attack), the Tsunami on Sri Lanka, or Katrina Hurricane hitting New Orleans, USA, can be ‘recycled’ by adopting tourism policies that take death as a main attraction (Klein, 2007). Although this type of tourism has attracted criticism of post-Marxist sociologists, as the sign of sadist spectacle (Bloom 2000; Baudrillard 1996, 2006; Koch, 2005), other scholars opt to explore the issue to better understand tourists’ apparent fascination of ‘Other’ suffering. In this vein, dark tourism alludes to new forms of tourism consumption, which are different from typical tourism products of sun, sea, and sand. One of the aspects that define dark tourism is the seemingly negative (macabre) landscape that exerts fascination in Others (Stone, 2012; Wilson, 2008; Sharpley, 2005; Korstanje, 2011; Sather-Wagstaff, 2011).