The Affective Negotiation of Slum Tourism Each year, approximately a million tourists visit slum areas on guided tours as a part of their holiday to Asia, Africa or Latin America. This book analyses the cultural encounters that take place between slum tourists and former street children, who work as tour guides for a local NGO in Delhi, India. Slum tours are typically framed as both tourist performances, bought as commodities for a price on the market, and as appeals for aid that tourists encounter within an altruistic discourse of charity. This book enriches the tourism debate by interpreting tourist performances as affective economies, identifying tour guides as emotional labourers and raising questions on the long-term impacts of economically unbalanced encounters with representatives of the Global North, including the researcher. This book studies the ‘feeling rules’ governing a slum tour and how they shape interactions. When do guides permit tourists to exoticise the slum and feel a thrilling sense of disgust towards the effects of abject poverty, and when do they instead guide them towards a sense of solidarity with the slum’s inhabitants? What happens if the tourists rebel and transgress the boundaries delimiting the space of comfortable affective negotiation constituted by the guides? This book will be essential reading for undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers working within the fields of human geography, slum tourism research, subaltern studies and development studies. Tore Holst is External Lecturer at Cultural Encounters, Roskilde University, where he teaches mobility, migration, postcolonial literature, epistemology and the correlation between modernity and colonialism. He obtained his PhD from Roskilde University in 2016, with a thesis which this book is based on. He has also published postcolonial literature and focused on how the colonial relation between the Danish state and Greenland becomes visible when climate narratives are enacted and disseminated via the media. Routledge Advances in Tourism and Anthropology Series Edited by Dr Catherine Palmer and Dr Jo-Anne Lester Dr Catherine Palmer (University of Brighton, UK) [email protected] Dr Jo-Anne Lester (University of Brighton, UK) [email protected] To discuss any ideas for the series please contact Faye Leerink, Commissioning Editor: [email protected] or the Series Editors. This series draws inspiration from anthropology’s overarching aim to explore and better understand the human condition in all its fascinating diversity. It seeks to expand the intellectual landscape of anthropology and tourism in relation to how we understand the experience of being human, providing critical inquiry into the spaces, places, and lives in which tourism unfolds. Contributions to the series will consider how such spaces are embodied, imagined, constructed, expe- rienced, memorialized and contested. The series provides a forum for cutting- edge research and innovative thinking from tourism, anthropology, and related disciplines such as philosophy, history, sociology, geography, cultural studies, architecture, the arts, and feminist studies. The Affective Negotiation of Slum Tourism City Walks in Delhi Tore Holst Tourism and Ethnodevelopment Inclusion, Empowerment and Self Determination Edited by Ismar Borges de Lima and Victor King Everyday Practices of Tourism Mobilities Packing a Bag Kaya Barry Tourism and Indigenous Heritage in Latin America Casper Jacobsen The Affective Negotiation of Slum Tourism City Walks in Delhi Tore Holst First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Tore Holst The right Tore Holst to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-72989-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-18959-8 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC Contents List of illustrations vii Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 Research questions and overview of chapters 1 Case, methods and ethical considerations 7 1 Slum tourism, subalternity and gentrification 15 Defining slums and jhuggi jhopris 15 The agency of the urban Indian governed 18 The marginalisation of Delhi’s jhuggi jhopris 25 Salaam Baalak Trust’s City Walk and the demolition of the Akanksha Colony 30 Conclusion 35 2 The authentic slum or former street children as prisms of authenticity? 37 Conceptualising Delhi’s informal urbanism as a creative, subaltern space 37 Discursive and performative approaches to studying tourism 41 Street life and ‘prisms of authenticity’ in Pahar Ganj 45 Conclusion 55 3 Playing with privilege? The ethics of aestheticising the slum 59 Whiteness and slum tourism 59 Privilege and playful abjection on the CW 66 The pedagogical and performative track of the CW 75 Conclusion 79 vi Contents 4 The affective economy of slum tourism 83 Tourists’ responses to the CW 83 Economies of affect and capital in tourism 87 The anxiety of encountering shelter-home children 93 Conclusion 98 5 The post-humanitarian logic of slum tourism 101 Soft- and hardcore poverty porn and ironic humanitarian appeals 101 The anger of encountering shelter-home children 109 The grief and pain of encountering shelter-home children 112 Conclusion 116 6 The emotional labour of CW-guides 121 Collecting data on the CW-guides 121 The shaping of a guide’s ‘personal story’ 123 Excluded stories and ironic performances 129 Subaltern shame and performative therapy 135 Conclusion 139 7 The economy of resocialisation: the slumming researcher? 141 Scripts of involvement and detachment in volunteering 141 My position within SBT 148 The researcher as performer? 155 Conclusion 159 Conclusion and further perspectives 161 The show/shield debate and (im)possible articulations of solidarity 161 Subalternity, meritocracy and hegemony 165 References 169 Appendix 179 Index 181 Illustrations Figures 0.1 Welcome to SBT – sign at the entrance of the Aasra Shelter Home 7 1.1 Demolition of Akanksha Colony – girl on rubble, captured by Jessie Hodges 16 1.2 Demolition of Akanksha Colony – salvaging water storage utensils, captured by Jessie Hodges 28 1.3 Demolition of Akanksha Colony – salvaging building materials and utensils, captured by Jessie Hodges 29 1.4 Demolition of Akanksha Colony – police and bulldozer, captured by Jessie Hodges 29 1.5 Demolition of Akanksha Colony – salvaging doors, beds and LPG-canisters (gas), captured by Jessie Hodges 30 2.1 Street child collecting trash in Pahar Ganj 45 2.2 The ‘God Lane’, point (g) of the new CW Route 52 3.1 Pahar Ganj bylane, point (d) of the new CW Route 60 3.2 The trash room near the pottery market on the City Walk 75 4.1 The researcher interacting with SBT-children at Aasra Shelter Home 93 5.1 Interaction between tourists and SBT-children at Aasra Shelter Home 108 5.2 Tourists and SBT-children playing pat-a-cake at Aasra Shelter Home 109 6.1 A CW-guide explains the poster of ‘success stories’ among former SBT-children at Aasra shelter home at the of the City Walk 123 6.2 A CW-guide expands on the merits of former CW-guides at Aasra shelter home at the of the City Walk 134 7.1 SBT-ambassador posing by a classic car at the Ojas Gallery after SBT’s fundraising event 154 Maps 2.1 Map of the old CW-route 179 2.2 Map of the new CW-route 180 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my mentors, Lars Jensen and Kirsten Holst Petersen, who has spent an inordinate amount of time reading, discussing and advising me. It’s been a long road and hopefully it will be longer. Equally warm thanks go out to my other wonderful colleagues at Cultural Encounters, Roskilde University, Den- mark. Your work is an inspiration to me. Everyone at SBT was helpful and welcoming to me and showed a lot of trust in letting me snoop freely around their backyard. Special thanks go out to Danish and Nick, however – you are all over these pages, even if your names are not. Jan Samuelsen, Rikke Frisk, Cern and Anwesha Chakraborty: your hospitality, friendship and input came at a critical time. Niels and Ida, who are as involved in this project as in my first steps, and Mette and Theo, who keeps me sane. Thanks all.