Introduction
Although you should never judge a book by its cover, you might sometimes form an opinion of a book from its dedication. This is the case for the monograph The Future of Dark Tourism, edited by Stone and Wright as the eighth instalment in the CNC Press series The Future of Tourism. This is because the book is dedicated to the loving memory of Fredrick Stone (1943–2020), Philip’s father, and to Alessia Wright, Daniel’s daughter, who was born during its creation. It is a tangible demonstration of the “200-years present” foresight concept by Elise Boulding (Bell, 2003). According to this intergenerational approach, the time span of researched futures at any given time should cover 100 years before, which is the generation of our parents and grandparents, and 100 years ahead, the generation of our children and grandchildren. It seems important to reflect on the implications of this dedication as an unofficial framework for a valuable book about a niche phenomenon of wider social relevance, despite its existence in a recreational consumption sector like tourism.
As the editors define it in their complete and actionable introduction, “Dark tourism is travelling to places of death, disaster or the macabre, where we get a sense of our mortality through the stories of people who came before us” (Stone and Wright, 2024, p. XVIII). While this may seem like a marginal phenomenon to mainstream practitioners and conventional scholars in the fields of tourism, hospitality and leisure, the editors highlight how Dark Tourism poses significant and somehow unprecedented challenges to our self-perception and identity. They also emphasise the risk of commodification and exploitation of intangible heritage and communal ethical sentiment when sites of natural or historical tragedies are converted for business purposes. Meanwhile, popular destinations such as the Colosseum in Rome are also inevitably associated with death, having been used for gladiator fights and martyrdom, although this is now sanitised. Therefore, the semantic description of Dark Tourism might fall within the postmodern notions of self-perception and collective construction. These challenges, however daunting, seemingly stimulated the scholars who contributed to this book, offering views and findings on its subject from Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia and Australia. Such views and insights about the future of Dark Tourism encompass both physical and virtual realities, with time and place serving as vectors that reconnect tourists to the dark elements underlying their experiential choices when visiting specific sites.
The book is divided into 22 chapters, each written by a specific author, and it also contains a preface and afterword by the editors, who wrote chapter one (the latter signed by Stone alone). Epistemological perspectives vary from Foucauldian thinking to postmodern analysis, to proposals for intervention and action, such as the geopoetics conceptual framing device for Arctic Tourism by Alex Varnajot (Chapter 10). An overview of themes and topics may include
Death, suicide, afterlife, cemeteries, burial ceremonies
Ethnic tensions, climate change, the Holocaust,
Museums, monuments, memorials, prisons
Robots, augmented reality, emerging technologies.
In addition to technological innovations and digital developments enabling novel experiences, the book pays close attention to the linguistic, anthropological and sociological interpretations of why Dark Tourism is emerging, or “booming”, as Brianna Wyatt states (Chapter 19).
For foresight professionals and futures scholars, deviant lifestyles and behaviours within a given society may offer valuable insights into sociological breakthroughs and potential new trend directions (Matthews and Wacker, 2022). Reflecting on and studying the future of Dark Tourism may therefore prove valuable in envisioning the themes and topics that could eventually matter to mainstream audiences.
Despite its distinctly scientific nature, leisure and tourism practitioners as well as applied researchers may find this book to be a valuable opportunity to explore new ideas, offering both innovation and criticism (including self-criticism) regarding their profession, their sectors and their business futures as leisure and tourism are examined and rethought in depth in these pages. Lastly, from an educational perspective, The Future of Dark Tourism is an ideal monograph for MSc and MA students as it combines analytical depth with intellectual freshness, connecting this niche area of tourism to the broader, more generic context of our future.
This book is a concise yet occasionally boundary-pushing collection of valuable essays on an important topic. The editors indicate in their introduction how this monograph is the “first-ever scholarly volume to critically explore dark tourism futures” (Stone and Wright, 2024, p. XIX). This is because, like Abnormal Leisure or any other form of deviance from accepted standards and current middle ground, Dark Tourism might tell us much more and speak to us much louder about alternative futures and the options that lie ahead, whether those futures are dystopian or preferable. In this spirit, the closing quote proposed by the editors as a conclusion of their introduction, attributed to Mother Teresa of Kolkata: “Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.” (Stone and Wright, 2024, p. XXV). This monograph offers several important opportunities for inspiration that will inform future developments. This monograph provides valuable inspiration for the future.
