Toward a New Tourism: Albert Wendt and Becoming Attractions

5W ith the outnumbering of native speakers of English by nonnative speakers, the question arises of just who is culturally native to the English language, or better yet, what counts as native in the first place. By now, of course, we must admit that neither of these questions has an easy, either/or answer. Whether we call it hybridity, performance, multiculturalism, postcoloniality, postmodernity, or transnationalism, the "play" between the poles constitutes the space in which further work can be done. That work, moreover, is produced in movements of ideas across discursive fields as well as in those of people across geopolitical territories. The much-maligned practice of tourism is, thus, one way of addressing these issues. By examining tourism's history, politics, affiliations, discourse, and phenomenology, we can suggest how tourism can be transformed symbolically into a model both of and for a certain utopian vision. Insofar as tourism has always been as much about self-discovery as it has been about the world outside the self, this vision presents a dialectical version of subjectivity. This article takes as its particular example Albert Wendt, a writer