Margaret Werry – författare

No longer the dreary sheep farm at the end of the world, the New Zealand of the new millennium is a hot global ticket, heralded for its bicultural dynamism, laid-back lifestyle, and scenery extraordinary enough to pass for Tolkien’s Middle Earth. How this image was crafted is the story The Tourist State tells. In a series of narratives that address the embodied dimensions of biopolitics and explore the collision of race, performance, and the cultural poetics of the state, Margaret Werry exposes the real drama behind the new New Zealand, revealing how a nation was sold to the world-and to itself.The story stretches back to the so-called Liberal Era at the beginning of the twentieth century, in which the young settler colony touted itself as the social laboratory of the world. Focusing on where tourism and liberal governmentality coincide, The Tourist State takes us from military diplomacy at the dawn of the American Pacific to the exotic blandishments of Broadway and Coney Island, from landscape preservation to health reform and town planning, from blockbuster film to knowledge economy policy. Weaving together interpretive history, performance ethnography, and cultural criticism, Werry offers new ways to think about race and indigeneity-and about the role of human agency in state-making.

How does tourism impact theatre? How do theatrical ways of seeing, knowing, and acting shape tourism? How do economic and political processes like colonization or neoliberalization influence them both? And what is the future of these twinned global leisure industries?Theatre and tourism are kindred practices. Both engage their patrons in experiences of temporary escape to distant places, times, or different lives. Both stage expressive, communicative, embodied encounters in real time and space. Tourism and theatre are both sites of public pedagogy, cultural diplomacy, and cosmopolitan consciousness, promising pleasure and knowledge from the spectacle of others and elsewheres. This concise study explores the historical and contemporary entanglement of theatre and tourism, and speculates about the future as emerging technologies reshape both industries, offering new experiences of presence, embodiment, and mobility.

How does tourism impact theatre? How do theatrical ways of seeing, knowing, and acting shape tourism? How do economic and political processes like colonization or neoliberalization influence them both? And what is the future of these twinned global leisure industries?Theatre and tourism are kindred practices. Both engage their patrons in experiences of temporary escape to distant places, times, or different lives. Both stage expressive, communicative, embodied encounters in real time and space. Tourism and theatre are both sites of public pedagogy, cultural diplomacy, and cosmopolitan consciousness, promising pleasure and knowledge from the spectacle of others and elsewheres. This concise study explores the historical and contemporary entanglement of theatre and tourism, and speculates about the future as emerging technologies reshape both industries, offering new experiences of presence, embodiment, and mobility.