Tourism, empire and aftermath in French North Africa

This review considers recent scholarly research dedicated to colonial tourism in French North Africa, and looks to signal important lacunae and avenues of possibility for future work. Despite the prominent 'colonial turn' in French historical studies since the 1990s, and an ever-burgeoning interdisciplinary and transnational scholarship in Tourist Studies, North African tourism has been relatively slow to attract sustained research attention. By its very nature, as a mode of organizing and enacting meaningful movement across space, tourism couldn't help but be implicated in the larger French pursuit of colonial territoriality and governance within its modern empire. Using three recent volumes - two monographs and an edited collection - as its basis, the review takes stock of the current state of historical understanding of North African colonial tourism history through three thematic rubrics: Tourist Development, Organization, and Infrastructure; Sites and Forms of Colonial Tourism in North Africa; Relationships and Exchanges of Colonial Tourism. It also reflects briefly on the historical legacies of colonial tourism in more contemporary time, including the relationship between colonial and postcolonial variants of tourism in the region.