The Affective Negotiation of Slum Tourism

City Walks in Delhi

Tore Holst

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138729896
• eBook ISBN: 9781351746564
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

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.

1 Slum tourism, subalternity and gentrification

Defining slums and jhuggi jhopris

What is a slum? This apparently simple question is linked to a more intricate one. What are the limits of the knowledge it is practically and ethically viable to articulate about ‘slums’ and the urban subalterns inhabiting them? The pronounced goal of most slum tourism is a respectful encounter between the global North and South in spaces that are discursively constructed as the ‘home’ of the representatives of the global South. But what are the implications of representing slums? What happens for instance if their added visibility increases the chances of them being cleared by bulldozers? Does this threat influence how we might produce knowledge about slums? Or whether we even use the word?

Mike Davis’s book Planet of Slums cites the first ‘scientific’ survey of slums in America The Slums of Baltimore, Chicago, New York and Philadelphia (1894) to ‘define an area of slum as “an area of dirty, black streets, especially when inhabited by a squalid and criminal population” ’ (Wright 1864, 11–15 in Davis 2006, 22, my italics), thus indicating that the squalor of slum areas is reflected in the ‘squalor’ and ‘criminality’ of the people living there, as well as notions of ‘race’. Roughly 20 years before however, in 1872, Friedrich Engels writing on The Housing Question had quite another assessment of why areas of squalid working-class housing could not be abolished:

The breeding places of disease, the infamous holes and cellars in which the capitalist mode of production confines our workers night after night, are not abolished; they are merely shifted elsewhere! The same economic necessity that produced them in the first place, produces them in the next place.

(Engels 1872, 77)

To Engels, the ‘infamous holes and cellars’ are indeed a mark of shame to the metropolis, but not one that should be borne by the people inhabiting them but rather by the bourgeoisie, whose capitalist mode of production apparently necessitates the existence of these areas.

Seeking what one might call a de-politicised midway between the two views, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) roughly 100 years later defines a ‘slum’ as ‘a squalid and overcrowded urban area inhabited by very poor people. A house in such a place’. Wright’s and the OED’s definition both use the word squalid, but whereas Wright uses it to describe the population of a slum, the OED uses it to describe the area where they live, which is a marked departure from his approach. On the other hand, the OED avoids commenting on how the ‘poor people’ that inhabit slums become and stay poor, thus showing no partiality towards Engels’s view either. Similarly, Davis notes that other definitions of the word slum, like the one adopted by the United Nations (UN) at a conference in Nairobi in 2002, ‘discard [Wright’s] Victorian calumnies [but] otherwise preserves the classical definition of a slum, characterized by overcrowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, and insecurity of tenure’ (Davis 2006, 22–3). Still, it is not the case that these dispassionate definitions have completely supplanted the politically charged connotations of the earlier age and when the question of, say, the clearing, remodelling or developing of slums arises in public discussions, one might easily detect a semantic slippage between the word connoting something depraved (Wright), something merely poor and underdeveloped (UN and the OED) or something deprived (Engels). As we shall see, this is also very much the case in the Indian metropolis.

Figure 1.1 Demolition of Akanksha Colony – girl on rubble, captured by Jessie Hodges

When the noun slum is turned into a verb in the expressions ‘to slum’ or ‘to go slumming’, both have a pejorative ring to it. The OED defines it as ‘voluntarily spend time in uncomfortable conditions or at a lower social level than one’s own’, so ‘to slum’, according to the OED, does not necessarily mean to visit an actual slum but rather to act like an inverted snob, by seeking lower standards of living than is strictly necessary. However, visiting actual slums for recreational purposes is by no means a new practice. Seth Koven’s Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London shows for instance that the then slum districts of Whitechapel and Shoreditch were mentioned in the 1887 edition of Baekeder’s guidebook of London as places one could visit (Koven 2004, 1, 244). But even while visiting the slums, the Victorian upper and middle classes’ conception of it was ambivalent – a messy ‘mingling of good intentions and blinkered prejudices that informed their vision of the poor and themselves’ (2004, 3), and the ‘slum’ was thereby simultaneously an exoticised place of abandon, where the presence of for example ‘opium-dens’ and ‘whorehouses’ signalled a loosening of the moral strictures imposed by Victorian public life but, therefore, also a place the ‘comfortable classes’ felt compelled to reform. The ‘slum’ was therefore not only simultaneously depraved and deprived; it was also strangely desirous – partly because it was dangerous and vice versa.

As Dovey and King remind us in a contemporary setting (2012) the desire towards the slum might take the form of a fascination not only with filth, squalor and projected moral licentiousness, but also with the ‘sublime’ juxtaposition of opposites, that is the act of passing from the official city into its seedy underbelly, or perhaps even being able to hold both cityscapes in a single gaze simultaneously. The perceived danger that is linked to this desire therefore lies not only in what might befall the unwary tourist visiting such a seemingly lawless place but also in the moral implications of projecting these desires onto the perceived misery of others. See also Chapter 3.

Academically and ethically it is problematic to define what a ‘slum’ is in common parlance, without taking into account this very long history of sociopolitical struggle inherent in the sign, which (as we learn from Koven) is also inscribed into fantasies of both ‘helping those in need’ and ‘reaching across the divide’ into something unknown. As we move into modern-day slum tourism, Steinbrink (2012) argues that we have gone from ‘moral slumming’, referencing Koven, to ‘ethnic slumming’, exemplified by historic accounts of trips to ethnic settlements in New York, to ‘global slumming’, where tourists from the global North travels to sites of poverty in the global South, where they by virtue of their mobility construct themselves as ‘global travellers’ as opposed to the ‘locals’ they are there to meet. Commenting on this, Frenzel (2012, 60–1) suggests that the perceived justification for this global slumming among politically conscious visitors from the global North can imply an ‘Othering’ of the slums’ inhabitants as well as a ‘same-ing’. ‘Othering’ would imply that the poor, southern ‘locals’ are valued others, whose experience might teach the ‘globalised’ visitors important lessons, whereas ‘same-ing’ attempts to frame them as participants in the same global, economic system of exploitation that the visitors are also trying to combat, thus making them ‘comrades in arms’ of a sort. As examples of this practice in an Indian context we can turn to the studies of Reality Tours’ work in Dharavi, Mumbai (Meschkank 2012; Dyson 2012; Ma 2010). In their different ways all these studies support Frenzel’s impression that most tourists generally seek to reach across to a valued other or same in the slum and that this wish probably extends beyond politically conscious tourists to include most visitors. The question is, To what extent it is possible for them to do so?

In studies of how the Indian elite relates to the slum and its inhabitants in public discourse a quite different picture emerges. There are plenty of examples of ‘slums’, or jhuggi jhopris in Hindi, being defined negatively as that which is not affluent, not ordered, not modern and, therefore, should not possess a legitimate legal status. Neither Wright’s nor Engel’s depart significantly from this reasoning of othering as Wright discursively produces the slum and its inhabitants as the other of the modern nation and its metropolises, whereas Engels claims that they are othered, that is to say forced to live as anomalies within the nation/metropolis. Accounts of historical slumming from Koven and Steinbrink likewise imply the same othering, and it, therefore, does not seem tenable to use these as the theoretical basis of a conceptual framework that seeks to escape the image of the slum as a negatively defined category. One might think that it would be possible to use the lessons learned from globalised slum tours to do so, but as we move to Frenzel’s analysis of the tourists’ attempt to embrace the slum as a valued other or same, both justifications of slum tours seem to gloss over the complicity of the slumming visitors. The othering of them tries to confer value onto a perceived difference inscribed by poverty, but one might argue that this really only changes the stereotype of the slum and its inhabitants to a positive one rather than a negative one. Similarly, the same-ing of the slum simply erases the difference inscribed by poverty in the name of solidarity, as well as the fact that the tourists in a number of ways help to perpetuate the economic system that reproduces the inequality they purport to fight.

The agency of the urban Indian governed

But what about the knowledge about slums produced by inhabitants of slums? Here, we run into the conceptual problems articulated by Spivak (1988) about the possibility of the subaltern to speak, be heard and be understood within public discourse. This is not just a question of whether they are given time in the media to represent themselves or of whether the representatives chosen within the media are truly representing all of them or of whether they speak the language of money and power (English or perhaps Hindi) and with what proficiency? It is also a question of what knowledge they are able to produce about themselves and the places they live, within the discourses made available to them by the elite.

The genealogy of the contemporary, urban subaltern arguably starts with Antonio Gramsci’s critique of Marxian materialism in his analysis of The Southern Question (2005 [1926]), where he explores the possibility of the peasantry of the south of Italy uniting with proletarian workers from the north against the exploitative landowners and owners of the means of production in Italy at large. He writes in opposition to an understanding of the peasants as a class of people who have not yet reached political maturity, and who needs the insight of the industrial workers in the North to be able to organise themselves in the struggle against exploitation and that they are necessarily natural allies in this respect. Gramsci sets out to analyse the cultural and political setting of the south in order to frame the choices of the peasants as political choices, rather than actions brought about by false consciousness or political immaturity.

These thoughts are developed theoretically in his Prison Notebooks written 1926–37 (Gramsci 1971 or Gramsci 2011). Here, he argues that hegemony is created by a type of coercion that works not just through blunt force but also via consent, which is ingrained into the subaltern subject by public institutions such as churches and schools that among other things create structures of incentive that encourages this subject to advance within the social systems created by these institutions. This double-edged form of coercion is both exerted and resisted, and hegemony can thereby be defined not as an absolute form of control but rather as an unstable equilibrium of compromise (Gramsci 2011, 508–9).

A generation of Indian intellectuals has elaborated on this framework from the Kolkata-based Subaltern Studies Group to later incarnations in Delhi at Jawaharlal Nehru University or the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. This book identifies Partha Chatterjee (1986, 2004, 2013a, 2013b) as an overarching figure that spans this history of theorisation. In his writings, he connects the historical project of the 1980s of tracing the absence of the subaltern subject in colonial and postcolonial archives, to the ongoing project of exploring the discursive space of agency granted the contemporary ‘governed’, who might be positioned as subalterns within particular social settings, and his thoughts are thus pivotal to the analysis of the space of agency allowed the contemporary, Indian, urban subaltern.

Subaltern studies in India began as a way of writing Indian history from a perspective that departed both from colonialist elitism and an Indian bourgeoisie- nationalist elitism that, according to Partha Chatterjee, permeated the environment of South Asian history in the 1970s. In his essay ‘Brief History of Subaltern Studies’ he describes two competing approaches, where one based in Cambridge

argued that Indian nationalism was a bid for power by a handful of Indian elites who used the traditional bonds of caste and communal ties to mobilize the masses against British rule.

(Chatterjee 2010a, 291)

Thus the university-educated leaders of the Congress Party and the Muslim League are cast in the role of seducers of the illiterate masses. The other approach among Delhi-based historians

spoke of how the material conditions of colonial exploitation created the ground for an alliance of the different classes in Indian society and how a nationalist leadership inspired and organised the masses to join the struggle for national freedom.

(Ibid.)

That is to say that an oppressive colonial rule paved the way for nationalist leaders. Neither of these two historiographical traditions based on the logics of imperialism and nationalism respectively ‘had any place for the independent political actions of the subaltern classes’ (Ibid.). Drawing on Gramsci’s work on how the peasants of southern Italy might be seen as a politically conscious class, whose choices should be read in particular cultural settings, the Subaltern Studies Group set out to write history that recognised the Indian subaltern as a political force – not least in the struggle for independence.

Gramsci’s approach provides a conceptual way into exploring subaltern resistance in colonial India, but as subalterns are defined as a class of people situated outside – though dominated by – the hegemonic power structure, trying to understand them on their own terms is conceptually difficult, and this is illustrated by Chatterjee’s own study of ‘The Colonial State and Peasant Resistance in Bengal, 1920–1947’ (Chatterjee 2010a, 302–40). Chatterjee is, in a sense, forced to represent subalterns through the lens of resistance because they only appear in historical records kept in colonial India when they rebel against the colonial state, and this also means that they are always mediated to the researcher through the eyes of the colonial administration’s chroniclers. Methodologically, Chatterjee’s study therefore consists of taking historical documents, which were most often ‘prepared by official functionaries’ and then reading them ‘from the opposite standpoint’ (Chatterjee 2010a, 292), and the voice of the historical subaltern in this study is thus mostly reconstructed from sources that are hostile to them and only mentions them when they ‘make trouble’. Chatterjee is thereby left with empirical material stating how subaltern rebellions have been refracted by its chroniclers, and the nearest he can come to emulating Gramsci’s project in The Southern Question is to guess what gaps, silences and inconsistencies in the archives mean.

This methodological conundrum is further highlighted in the works of another member of the Subaltern Studies Group, Gyanendra Pandey, whose studies of communalism in colonial India (1989, 2006) use historical accounts of communal riots as empirical material. From this, it cannot be conclusively determined what some of the riots were actually about, because accounts of the chains of events leading up to the riots often contradict one another, but what can be determined is that certain early accounts of riots came to act as Master Narrative for later accounts. In this Master Narrative so-called sectarian ‘natives’ (‘Hindoos’, Muslims, Sikhs) apparently clash with other ‘natives’ after which the colonial power intervenes and peace is restored – often by quite violent means, though this is toned down in the reports using this narrative model. And though this master narrative is challenged by other sources claiming that at least some of the subsequent riots were directed at the colonial administration itself, rather than at other ‘natives’, the master narrative still act as a matrix for the writing of subsequent histories (2006, 16). The study provides an example of how subaltern resistance is written by colonial historians as featuring ‘natives’, who are represented as fighting amongst themselves, when evidence would suggest that they were also fighting against the colonial state and not always within the framework of sectarian communalism, which was seen by the colonial state as an example of pre-modern allegiances to religious faiths rather than to the state. In agreement with Chatterjee’s assessment of Indian bourgeois-nationalist historians in the 19...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Slum tourism, subalternity and gentrification
• 2 The authentic slum or former street children as prisms of authenticity?
• 3 Playing with privilege? The ethics of aestheticising the slum
• 4 The affective economy of slum tourism
• 5 The post-humanitarian logic of slum tourism
• 6 The emotional labour of CW-guides
• 7 The economy of resocialisation: the slumming researcher?
• Conclusion and further perspectives
• References
• Appendix
• Index