Going Places? Representing Precarity, Postcolonial Tourism and Environmentalism across Texts and Discourses

This contribution intends to critically read the interrelated notions of precarity, postcolonial tourism and environmentalism (Carrigan 2012; Crăciunescu 2016; Hall and Tucker 2004a) by examining some of its textual manifestations, in both literary and non-literary forms, with regard to the Indian postcolonial context, in particular the Andaman Islands. Today India is experiencing a growing emergence of tourism, thanks to a number of recent successful campaigns of promotion, but its impact upon local communities and ecologies may sometimes coincide with processes of exoticization and marginalization (Echtner and Prasad 2003), which impose, and perpetuate, a sense of (hidden) precarity, or ‘ecoprecarity’, especially when the so-called “minority” groups and their environment are concerned. The case study regards the geographical, cultural and social context of the Andaman Islands (Sen 2017) in order to discuss discourses of asymmetrical power relations, and reconfigurations, of indigenous identity and the environment. In particular, the chapter aims to question the linguistic, narrative, and ideological representation of Adivasi subjects, landscape and precarity by considering: 1) the multimodal dimension of the official Andaman and Nicobar Tourism website, and its multiple attention-grabbing materials, and 2) the rhetorical strategies of the Indian English fictional domain, with examples from young adult fiction (Gangopadhyay 2010) as well as human rights literature (Garg 2016). The methodological background is grounded on the combination of postcolonial studies, critical stylistics, and tourism discourse (e.g., Bandyopadhyay 2012; Dann 1996; Jeffries 2010).