Remembering as de/bordering: Russian tourism memories in the shadow of empire

How are tourist destinations perceived and remembered by tourists? What spatial orders are generated through tourists’ memories, and do they perpetuate or unsettle to existing territorial borders? Focusing on Russian tourism to cities in the former Soviet space, this talk analyses the role of tourism memories as devices of de/bordering in an unsettled post-imperial setting, shaped by assertive Russian nationalism and neoimperialist revisionism. While tourism and border scholarship has examined international relations and spatial imaginaries embedded in tourism – as promoting cross-border understanding and peace, or as part of (neo)colonialism or nation-building processes – the scholarship has been limited by its narrow temporal focus on present-day relations and imaginaries. In contrast, the talk draws attention to the temporal dimension of tourism encounters and border-making, focusing on how memories of the past play an important role in the construction of spatial orders. Drawing on extensive interviews and ethnographic research with Russian tourists in three cities in the former Soviet space, I focus on how tourists relate to destinations and co-produce their pasts through three key modes of remembering: imperial nostalgia, the consumption of ‘different’ pasts, and memory diplomacy. I highlight how these modes are based on memories of different historical periods and put forward opposing imaginations of empire and sovereignty, shaped by nostalgia for a former homeland, selective appreciation of national difference and, to a limited extent, a recognition of the significance of independence and historical violence. I conclude with a reflection on the empirical and conceptual implications of these findings for the current geopolitical context and the wider scholarship on memory, tourism and borders.

Alena Pfoser is Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media Studies at Loughborough University, UK. She studied social sciences and Russian and Eurasian Studies in Vienna, Krasnodar, St Petersburg and Loughborough. Her research focuses on contested cultural memories, heritage and identity in a transnational arena and has examined the production of cultural memories in tourism and remembering and place-making in the context of border change. She has published extensively in leading peer-reviewed journals and is the author of the forthcoming monograph “Tourism as memory-making: Russian tourism in the shadow of empire” based on her ESRC New Investigator Grant (2019-2022). She is currently a Mercator fellow in the Emmy Noether Independent Junior Research Group "The Social-Spatial Memory of European Borders” at the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space.