The Worldmaking Agency of the Sri Lankan Travel Blogger

Abstract

This article presents a scrutiny of the powerful "worldmaking" role performed by English language travel writers in the context of Sri Lanka. It critically positions travel representations as a crucial means of knowledge production that shapes the way Sri Lanka is known and experienced. In that, it examines an emerging version of the country produced by young Sri Lankan travel bloggers through their employment of an "activist gaze" alongside the use of a "promotional gaze" by professional tourism writers. The article illuminates each of these distinctive worldmaking roles; the latter engaging the authority of tourism in constructing/perpetuating a particular favored version of the country to persuade the global tourist, and the former's "aware" agency in constructing a potential or alternative representation distinctive from the first. However, surpassing an exploration of representations and their worldmaking power, the article sheds light on the way writers are inculcated into certain standpoints and their negotiation of these through the employment of the Bourdieusian concepts of habitus, capital, and field. As such, it innovatively combines structure and agency in the study of tourism representations, unveiling the social implications underlying worldmaking and thereby elucidating the critical link between the English language, travel writing and social class in an understudied postcolonial context of South Asia.