Tourist Utopias ─ Offshore Islands, Enclave Spaces, and Mobile Imaginaries

From Disneyworld to Abu Dhabi, and the resorts and casinos of Singapore and Macau, “tourist utopias” are a growing part of international capitalism. The book brings together a group of scholars from a wide range of disciplines to analyze these locations as “spaces of exception,” places where entrepreneurial and neoliberal governance relies on cooperation among state and non-state actors, as well as transient multinational populations of both workers and consumers. They serve, the contributors argue, as cultural laboratories for testing new protocols for neoliberal governance and capitalist production.
 

Timothy Simpson is associate professor of communication and associate dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Macau.