One village, many nostalgias: The entanglements of embodied scopic regimes in the landscape production of Chinese nostalgia tourism

Abstract

This article uses investigations into two villages to scrutinise the politics of space and visuality in the top-down development of nostalgia tourism across the Chinese countryside engineered by the government since 2014. It goes beyond the debate between the representational and non-representational approaches in tourist landscape studies and proposes the concept of ‘embodied scopic regimes’ as a more nuanced framework of analysis. It is argued that the landscape production in the current development of nostalgia tourism in China is featured by the coexistence and entanglement of three different embodied scopic regimes: ‘stop/gaze regime’, ‘flâneur/glance regime’ and ‘choraster/spectacle regime’. Each regime produces a unique fashion of visual pleasure and distinct mode of physical movements, manifested and afforded by different sets of cultural technologies. The operation of these multiple regimes also diversifies the meanings of nostalgia that these tourist sites claim to represent, which allows the overlapping between ‘reflective nostalgia’ and ‘restorative nostalgia’ in the same space. Based on this unique case, the article engages with the ‘landscape debate’ in critical tourist studies and extends the common ground between the two seemingly oppositional approaches.