Representing pace in tourism mobilities: staycations, Slow Travel and<i>The Amazing Race</i>

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the way popular representations of tourism make sense of pace within the context of Western modernity and asks how certain ethical and ideological values come to be associated with speed, slowness or stillness. In the typical story of modernity, speed is commonly associated with positive values such as 'freedom' and 'progress', while slowness and stillness are often seen as marginal or undesirable modes of mobility. The analysis presented suggests that paying attention to pace and the way pace is socially encoded in media contexts reveals a more complicated narrative of mobility and modernity. The article draws on an analysis of media representations of three popular modes of tourism – the 'staycation', a neologism invented to describe vacationing at home; Slow Travel; an emerging social movement that advocates travelling slowly and locally; and the television programme The Amazing Race – to argue that the way pace is socially encoded in these representations is central not only to a more nuanced story of modernity, but also to a 'politics of mobility'. Keywords: pacemodernitytourism mobilitiesstaycationSlow Travel The Amazing Race Acknowledgements The author wishes to thank Lydia Brauer and the two anonymous reviewers for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this article. Thanks are also due to the participants at the 2009 annual meeting of the Popular Culture and American Culture Association who provided helpful comments on the previous version of the article, and to Jack Estes for organising the panel on travel and tourism. Notes Nevertheless, survey data indicate that the practice was and continues to be significant. A report in The Financial Times cited a survey by road map publisher Rand McNally, which found that 57% of Americans planned to stay close to home during the summer of 2008 (Birchall, Citation2008). Results from a 2009 poll conducted by Harris Interactive indicate that 48% of respondents planned to take a vacation closer to home in 2009 (Harris Interactive, Inc., Citation2009). In a similar vein, Bergmann and Sager Citation(2008) have advocated looking for the 'thrill of the still' as an alternative to counteract the modernity-as-acceleration story. Although see Vannini's Citation(2002) argument that we can think of waiting as a dynamic form of becoming in the Deleuzian sense.