Unit 6: Belonging and Excluding: Tourist Practices in the Nationalizing State [FORTHCOMING]

Summary

Mass tourism is part of the non-migratory mobility that has been gaining popularity since the 19th century and has been institutionalized through organizations, thematic journals and professional guidebooks. Tourist practices offer insights into the history of leisure, increasing mobility, and the formation of the middle class. In Eastern Europe, tourism became an instrument of nation-building, strengthening the sense of belonging to a particular community. Governments actively promoted mass tourism in the case of the interwar nation-states. This module will first review the theoretical aspects of tourism as a practice that can reinforce different ideological positions. The module will examine two cases that illustrate this. The first is the promotion of tourism as a vehicle of national construction in interwar Poland, using the example of the border town of Zalishchyky (Zaleszczyki) in former Galicia. The second case deals with the emerging Jewish tourist movement “Krajoznawstwo/Landkentenish” which appeared as a response to the exclusion of the Jewish minority from the national Polish tourist practice but offered the Jews to find their belonging to the country through travel.

Author: Vladyslava Moskalets

Vladyslava Moskalets is the Coordinator of the Jewish Studies Program and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern and Contemporary History of Ukraine at the Ukrainian Catholic University. She received her PhD in History in 2017 from Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Moskalets has been a Fulbright Scholar at Northwestern University. Her research interests include Jewish studies, economic history, urban studies, the history of elites, the history of tourism, and the Yiddish language in Galicia.