Abstract:
The term 'dark tourism' was coined in 2000 to describe the popularity of sites of death and disaster. Such sites range from memorials, to sites of assassination, to natural or man-made calamity zone, and differ in mode from the austere to the kitsch to the thrill-seeking. Why these places are so compelling for visitors? I tease out the question and also consider the sense in which dark tourism attractions perform a kind of tragic drama for us. As Helene Cixous writes of the theatre, while we may chase away thoughts of death and suffering from our everyday lives, 'it is this part of life that theatre returns to us: the living part of death, or the mortal part of life.'
