The limits of tourism or the tourism as tragedy and farce: an analysis of the Dark Tourist series

Abstract

Tourism has historically been treated with an economic purpose, producing an economicist and mass tourism practice that commodified nature, the landscape, and the environment, bringing about territorial conflicts and cultural changes. What is known as dark tourism is a growing and evident modality that has recently been put on the agenda due to the Dark Tourist series (Netflix, 2018), in which its host visits various types of phenomena considered exotic from a tourist perspective. In these pages, I intend to make a brief critical reading of this documentary series that centers on the protagonist’s relationship with the visited places and sees the practices and phenomena represented in the series as a reproduction of the contradictions of capital that materialize themselves in actions that consume landscapes and environments, falsely revise history, and stereotypes the image of the other but which, if treated in another way, has a pedagogical potential.