[TimorLesteStudies] New article: Consuming and erasing Portugal in the Lonely Planet guide to East Timor

[Bu Wilson]

Consuming and erasing Portugal in the Lonely Planet guide to East Timor
David Callahan 
Postcolonial Studies, 1466-1888, Volume 14, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 95 – 109
http://www.informaworld.co/smpp/ftinterface~content=a933186465~fulltext=713240930~frm=content

   Abstract   The Australia-based Lonely Planet series of travel guides allies its  pragmatic agenda of informing mostly Western travellers with a didactic  project in which the traveller is partly inscribed within a discourse of  solidarity with the struggles and identities of the peoples whose  spaces and products are being consumed. The guidebook to East Timor is  arguably a special case within the Lonely Planet series, given the  fledgling nation's interpellation of Australia's sense of itself as a  people that both sponsors and represents freedom and justice, but which  spectacularly failed in its moral and historical responsibilities to the  East Timorese when they were invaded and oppressed within the  Indonesian empire. What will be found is that the guide contains a  troubled conjunction of moral support for East Timor, at times  neocolonial in its implications, and political rejection of the former  colonizer Portugal as a reference point for the East Timorese, while the  country's attractions for the Australian visitor are ironically  construed overwhelmingly in terms of visual markers of the Portuguese  colonial presence.  

Dr Bu V.E. Wilson
T: Australia +61  0  407 087 086
T: Timor-Leste + 670 744 0011
E: buvewilson at gmail.com





-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.anu.edu.au/pipermail/easttimorstudies/attachments/20110207/a1f8112d/attachment.html