Tourisms' Tristes Tropiques [CLOSED]
CALL for PAPERS full submission deadline: October 1, 2025 [CLOSED]
Special Issue Theme: Tourisms’ Tristes Tropiques
In the past couple of years, tourism has moved from revenge travel to overtourism in many places worldwide. As we entered 2025, the media was busy predicting the touristic year ahead. Some of the “must-see” places were simultaneously critiqued as sites “to avoid” due to overtourism. The famous island of Bali and the renowned city of Barcelona are cases in point—being at the top of both lists.
However, tourism has particular effects in the Tropics. The tropical regions of the world are undergoing rapid tourism development yet still suffer severe poverty; they are rich in biodiversity while being threatened by ecological destruction of land and sea through tourism; they are home to many of the world’s rainforest and maritime Indigenous peoples, but endure legacies of colonialism and tourism’s neocolonialism.
The emphasis of this Special Issue on Tourisms’ Tristes Tropiques draws attention to this tropical zone where the full scale and scope of tourism and its associated challenges and consequences are rapidly becoming materially manifest. The title for the special issue draws inspiration from Claude Lévi-Strauss’ famous memoir Tristes Tropiques (1955), a travelogue in which the anthropologist reflects upon the places he has visited, his ethnographic encounters with locals, and philosophical reflections and ideas across disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, geology, history, literature, and music. It has been admired for its reflexive style, which subverts the lust for exoticism, and critiqued for its sense of a “world on the wane.”
Our call for papers encourages contributors from various disciplines and fields, including anthropology of tourism, critical tourism studies, critical heritage studies, archaeology, environmental studies, human geography, history, architecture and urban planning, Science & Technology Studies, art and photography, media studies, literature, among others. We look forward to exploring how contributions to this issue challenge the overbearing banalities of neoliberal tourism discourses. We especially welcome reflexive engagements that stage tourism/tourists as agential rather than gazers:
- Rubbish tourism
- Environmental tourism
- Tourism and degrowth
- Overtourism as dark tourism
- Tropical anti-tourism activism
- Influencer and media tourism
- Indigenous tourism fights back
- Tourism as neocolonial practice
- Sex tourism as sadistic pleasure
- Medical tourism and birth tourism
- Anti-aesthetics and tropical tourism
- Postcolonial and decolonial tourism projects
- Carnivals, festivals, and touristic rites de passage
- Vampire tourists sucking the lifeblood out of local cultures
CFP Tourisms’ Tristes Tropiques
Reflecting the diversity of the tropics, this CFP is open to interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary intertwinings, as well as critical perspectives on established disciplinary approaches. It invites papers that consider the ecological interface between, for example: nature and culture, humans and animals, indigeneity and colonialism, science and literature, technology and poetics, histories and futures, reality and fiction, mythologies and mathematics, spirits and humans, natural sciences and social sciences, the mundane and sacred.
The Special Issue invites a wide range of articles and creative works from scholars who engage with critical tourism in the tropical regions of the world, including tropical Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, the Indian Ocean Islands, Tropical East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, tropical North Australia, Melanesia and the Pacific Ocean Islands, Hawai’i, and the American South.
eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the tropics publishes new research from Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences and allied fields on the variety and interrelatedness of nature, culture, and society in the Tropics. ISSN:1448-2940, free open access; indexed in Scopus, Google Scholar, Ulrich's, DOAJ; archived in Pandora, Sherpa/Romeo; uses DOIs and Crossref, ranked Scimago Q1.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS
- Submissions close October 1, 2025 (full paper)
- Publication date: March-April 2026
- Submissions must conform to the eTropic Style Sheet & Layout
- Research article submissions should be 6000-8000 words
- Literary, creative works and photographic essays 4000-5000 words
- Titles should be concise and clear (maximum 2 lines at 16 point Georgia font bold)
- Include a 100-200-word abstract of the article or creative work + 5 keyword phrases
- Submissions should be uploaded to eTropic online journal site
- Submit 2 copies of your work: copy 1 with full author details; copy 2 anonymized
- Author copy: name of author(s), institution(s), country, and Orcid ID (https://orcid.org/)
- Author copy: provide a 100-word biographical note for each author (at the end of the article)
- Precisely follow APA (edition 7) for in-text citations and reference list
- Contributions should be submitted as a Microsoft Word file (.docx)
- All images must be used with permission and referenced
- Suitable papers will be double-anonymous peer reviewed
- Authors should consult eTropic archives to familiarize themselves with tropics/tropicality
- eTropic website https://journals.jcu.edu.au/etropic/index
- For enquiries, or for pitching your ideas or abstracts, please email eTropic
Editors: Carla Guerrón Montero, University of Delaware, U.S., Anita Lundberg, James Cook University, Australia & Singapore.
Read more about Tourisms' Tristes Tropiques [CLOSED]