Heritage in the Digital Era: Cinematic Tourism and the Activist Cause (Routledge Advances in Sociology) - Hardcover

Tzanelli, Rodanthi

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0415643805 ISBN 13: 9780415643801

Publisher: Routledge, 2013

Synopsis

What happens to traditional conceptions of 'heritage', in the era of fluid media spaces? 'Heritage' usually involves intergenerational transmission of ideas, customs, ancestral lands, and artefacts, and so serves to reproduce national communities over time. However, media industries have the power to transform national lands and histories into generic landscapes and ideas through digital reproductions or modifications, prompting renegotiations of belonging in new ways. Contemporary media allow digital environments to function as transnational classrooms, creating virtual spaces of debate for people with access to televised, cinematic and Internet ideas and networks.
This book examines a range of popular cinematic interventions that are reshaping national and global heritage, across Europe, Asia, the Americas and Australasia. It examines collaborative or adversarial articulations of such enterprise  (by artists, directors, producers but also local, national and transnational communities) that blend activism with commodification, presenting new cultural industries as fluid but significant agents in the production of new public spheres.   

CONTENTS
List of illustrations/Acknowledgments/Rethinking heritage: cultural industries and global kin/Heritage entropy? Cinematic pilgrimage in New Zealand (2010)/The Da Vinci 'node': networks of neo-pilgrimage in the European cosmopolis (2006-2008)/Projecting European heritage: Acropolis in Ruins (2009)/Memory and protest: Yimou Zhang's and Ai Weiwei's artwork (2004-2011)/From deep ecology to thick description: Avatar's (2009) 'cosmology of protest'/Bibliography

About this title

About the Author:

Rodanthi Tzanelli is lecturer in Sociology at the School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds. She has been Deputy Director at the Center for Ethnicity and Racism Studies, Leeds (2007-2011), and Visiting Lecturer and Research Fellow at the Centre for Mobilities Research, Lancaster University (April-August 2007, November 2008-September 2009). Currently, she serves as member of International Advisory Board, Ikarian Centre for Social and Political Research, Ikaria, Greece and as Associate Member at the Institute for Colonial and Post-colonial Studies, University of Leeds. Her research interests include the sociology of globalisation and tourism (with particular reference to the politics and ethics of culture industries and the relationship of film and tourist industries) and representations of deviancy (with particular reference to race, ethnicity and gender). She has published on national identity, cosmopolitanism, globalization and the ethics and politics of cultural industries (media, tourism). She is the author of four books including The Cinematic Tourist: Explorations in Globalization, Culture and Resistance (2007 hardback, 2010 paperback)and Cosmopolitan Memory in Europe's "Backwaters": Rethinking Civility (2011). Her new book, 'Heritage in the Digital Era: Cinematic Tourism and the Activist Cause', will be published with Routledge in early 2013.

Review:

"Rodanthi Tzanelli is a leading analyst of how cinematic, tourist and political mobilities are complexly intertwined. In Heritage of the Digital Era she powerfully dissects five cases which exemplify many new intersecting mobilities within the digital era" -- John Urry, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Lancaster University

"This is a fascinating and timely book. Tzanelli takes us on a grand cinematic tour across the world in a penetrating discussion of the digital re-invention of heritage" -- Vassos Argyrou, Reader in Social Anthropology, University of Hull

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0415643805
• ISBN 13: 9780415643801
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 248