On Methodology and (Post)Colonialism in Tourism Promotional Language

Abstract

The greatest challenge of the present paper is the research paradox that tourism imbeds within its economic and historical realities. Whilst tributary to Western research methodologies, we realized that an impartial analysis of tourism studies, which is essentially postcolonial, presupposes a pertinent review of ''marginal'' state of the art in the field. As scholars argue, tourism has developed a language of its own in order to promote cultural patterns of authenticity. This universal lexicon is largely rooted in myth and otherness, which lead us to the exemplification from a semio-linguistic perspective of a paradisiacal destination −Jamaica − included in the categories of such by the normative Westerner. We also touch upon gender issues on the larger colonialist background that the relation Self-Other, Orient-Occident, Colonizer-Colonized raises even at a methodological level in recent literature.