Affect Tourism
Albert Szukalski, The Last Supper. Goldwell Open Air Museum. Beatty, NV. Photo property of the author.
BY JACQUELINE JENKINS
This short provocation was written for and presented in the session “Liveness in a Remote World” at the 2023 annual meeting of the Modern Language Association (San Francisco, 5 – 8 January). I’m grateful to the organizer, Angelina Del Balzo (Bilkent U), and the other panelists of the session (Salvador Herrera, UCLA; Nevena Martinovic, Royal Military College; Cord-Heinrich Plinke, U Southern California) for sharing space with me to think through the question of contemporary affective engagement with historically remote religious practices. What follows is a slightly revised version of that presentation.
This exploration represents early thinking about a new project, one that integrates theories of affect and affective engagement with performance studies, medievalism and medieval studies, as well as the field of tourism studies. More precisely, I am drawn to the role of affect in contemporary performances of medieval practices at sites of historic importance. This turn to affect studies, for me, emerges within the specific context of a broader consideration of the cultural work of medieval performance rites in the lives of contemporary secular academics, lay-historians, and tourists seeking experiences of the medieval ‘real’, or the historically, even religiously, ‘authentic’. In what follows, I briefly sketch the shape of the questions I am asking through this research, and then offer two examples by way of illustration.
So first, the questions: Focused as it is on the issue of the appeal of historically and affectually remote performances to contemporary audiences, this project shares some of the approaches of the related fields of heritage or nostalgia tourism, dark tourism, and religious or faith tourism. But my interest is specifically on the affective appeal of engaging in an embodied way with medieval, typically religious, site-specific performance rites to participants who do not share in either the worldview or the religious sentiments of the experiences; these embodied engagements I refer to raise perplexing questions about the role affect plays in the participants’ experiences. For instance, what brings contemporary, often scholarly, and typically secular audiences to religious performance events such as the City of York’s biennial productions of the York biblical plays, or the (until recently) decennial Passion Play of Oberammergau? What is the cultural work of pilgrimage tourism, and what role does affect play in the experiences people have while walking the Camino de Santiago (well over 400,000 ‘pilgrims’ in 2022) or the less travelled Sentier Cathare with its popular sites of historic Inquisitional horror?
These questions overlap in some ways with the approach presented by Stephanie Trigg, in her important 2005 article, “Walking through Cathedrals: Scholars, Pilgrims and Medieval Tourists.” In her article, Trigg offers what she refers to as a “meditation on the experience of visiting medieval religious sites, in our various capacities as medieval scholars, as pilgrims, and as tourists,” indicating further her explicit interest in the sites’ abilities to accommodate “the potentially conflicting interests of those groups: worshippers, pilgrims, tourists and scholars” (9, 10). The role of the “scholarly tourist” (12), as Trigg refers to academics walking through cathedrals, or visiting far-away celebrated historical or medieval-themed sites, as well as the impact of tourism on those sites, are both central to her work.
And though Trigg anticipates the turn to a consideration of affect that I am exploring in her assertion that “Medievalists are not always exclusively either scholars, tourists, or pilgrims,” and that “this mixed experience offers instructive shifts in our own subject position as we stroll through these sites with notebook in hand, and/or with family in tow” (12), my objective with this project is to drill down into the appeal, the attraction, that draws audiences specifically to performances of historically remote religious events.
My preliminary argument is that it is for a specifically (but uncertain) affective engagement that most tourists seek out experiences so remote from their contemporary lives, and that the cultural work of what I am in this research calling ‘affect tourism’ is a rich and as yet under-identified area in affect studies. It is of course possible that audiences for contemporary performances of medieval religious practices may in fact be seeking a specifically religious engagement, ie., the affective experience is both explicitly expected and prescribed; these audiences may identify overtly as sharing those religious practices that have endured across time. One example, perhaps obviously, would be the annual Passion Play performed in Drumheller, Alberta. The website for this performance signals clearly the organizers’ intent to invoke a specific, faith-based community and, by extension it seems, to exclude scholarly or critical viewers: we read “For over 28 years, hundreds of thousands of audience members like you have experienced an epic story of faith, hope & love on Canada’s largest outdoor stage” [https://badlandsamp.com/badlands-passion-play/; emphasis mine].
Affect and affectivity are particularly useful concepts for this project as it develops, for both the contemporary and medieval connotations. The experiences I’m interested in attract at least in part because the experience itself frequently requires a shifting or unstable identity, a willingness to engage in an alien subject position; the affect in the experience functions capaciously, to paraphrase Wendy Truran, introducing the potential for a change in our capacity occasioned “in some way by the impact of an encounter with something: a body, an object, an idea, or an emotion” (28). The experience is relational, typically communal, often emotional (following Sara Ahmed), and inclusive of what Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth identify as “atmospheres of sociality, crowd behaviors, contagions of feeling, matters of belonging,” (number seven in their “Inventory of Shimmers,” 8). I think also of Lauren Berlant’s use of “intimate publics,” especially in the way this idea signals, as Jay Prosser observes, “strangers formed into affective ties” (180).
The entry-points to thinking about affect that I have touched on here recall in striking ways affectivity and affective engagement as witnessed in the medieval period: the public expression of emotion that was shaped, encouraged, and promoted to incite affective change, a process of spiritual deepening through emotional expression, through encounter of the believer’s body with – typically – the broken physical body of Christ, but also other Christian martyrs (for instance, see McNamer; Gibbs). Often feminized, as a spiritual experience affectivity was hierarchically less than the intellectual and/or rational experience of theology, and was suspect precisely because of its sociality, communal expression, intensity and easy contagion (see McNamer).
Thus, I am experimenting with the term ‘affect tourism’ as a way of signaling an embodied engagement, a highly performative engagement, with rituals and performances from the medieval Christian past. I want to signal the ways an audience – understood in the singular as well as collectively – is invited, through a specific performance, to take up a particular role in relation to that experience; and that the willingness to take up that particular role – and the temporary suspension of the subject self (scholarly, secular, academic, skeptical) as needed to do so – is a vital, even fundamental, part of the appeal, as is the process, the desire to be affected in the process, the capaciousness of the experience.
The examples I consider mostly address instances of scholarly or academic, expert, secular or non-Christian, audiences choosing to engage experiences of historically remote medieval religious performance practices, often but not always site-specific ones. I listed several kinds of examples above, but here I want to briefly sketch two in illustration. The first occurred at a conference I attended several years ago, in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. As part of the conference (and included in the conference fees), conference participants were provided the opportunity to witness the swinging of the famous thurible, the massive Botafumeiro, in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. We weren’t pilgrims, we conference-goers, and many of us (maybe the majority of us) were neither practicing Catholic nor Christian, but we willingly – eagerly even – filed into the cathedral to experience this most special ritual, reserved for holy days and communities of believers and pilgrims gathered at mass. For those moments, we were collectively called into a subject position not our own, connected emotionally through the experience, and changed – if only temporarily – by our encounter with this ritual from the past. This temporary change, this shift from academic conference-goer to peregrina or peregrino, was made manifest in the wearing of the scallop shell pin, a sign typically reserved for those walking the pilgrimage route, that each of us received as part of our conference swag. Again, to be clear: we were not pilgrims, having not arrived in Santiago by foot after weeks of travel, but were – at least briefly, in that historic space– seekers of the ‘authentic’ pilgrim experience.
The second example I’ll describe is the performance of a version of the Middle English life of St Katherine of Alexandria that I have been working on and that I was invited to direct as part of a program of performances for a joint-meeting of the Society for International Medieval Theatre (SITM) and Records of Early English Drama-North East in Durham in 2016; this performance took place in the sixteenth-century Tunstall Chapel in Durham Castle, and involved nine actors; an audience of over 100 academics, archivists, theatre-practitioners and musicians; and 1000 lines of Middle English verse. Because of the nature of the text, we were bringing it to the stage for the first time in a contemporary, post-medieval setting, and as we discovered, a number of challenges emerged. For instance, the female saint’s body, sexualized and contested, and marked by both violence and sanctity, is a particularly fraught site for contemporary performance, as is the inherent affectivity of the text. As a performance of the saint’s passion, the narrative of the text is entirely subordinated to the didactic religious and, arguably, authoritarian social lesson. Formulaic, moralistic, and hyperbolic, saints’ legends in the medieval period depended heavily on a shared system of belief for their ‘success,’ measured in popularity and appeal.
For a contemporary audience constituted as just described (academics, archivists, theatre-practitioners and musicians of historical instruments) the obstacles to engagement were significant. The violence of the narrative is impossible to render on-stage realistically, the story’s miracles defy academic or secular belief, the humour is, well, not funny. But without doubt, the greatest challenge the performance presented centered on the depiction of the saint’s body as she moved through the events of the narrative: the legend stipulates that Katherine begins as a royal daughter of Alexandria, but is progressively imprisoned, beaten, displayed and eventually beheaded. Beaten, bloodied, but not submissive: her physical body became our performance crux. Despite being crucial to the medieval performance of suffering and medieval affectivity, blood is almost ridiculously hard to depict successfully: messy, unsettling, and irreversible, blood ruins costumes, looks fake, potently evokes the female body, and has the potential to provoke a contemporary audience’s innate skepticism (see Davidson). The challenges we felt in portraying the violence were keenly shared by the actor, who struggled with how to play the saint convincingly—or wondered even if her task was to play the saint convincingly. Lacking a personal connection to the saint’s suffering or to the ‘message’ of the story, her conflict with this particular role threw into relief the larger, more generalized questions we brought to the production as a whole.
To be clear: my original intent with the production was to demonstrate through the success of its performance the validity of my claim about the text’s inherent performativity – this is why I was invited to include the performance in this program in the first place. We were not intentionally producing it as a religious text, or as a means to incite a communal affective response – though this was the intent of the medieval text, with its explicit and insistent calls to affectivity and socio-religious community identity. Nevertheless, to fully succeed in our contemporary context, we knew it needed to do more than simply perform well; it needed to performatively engage our audience in ways I believe the text mandates, but that were out-of-sync with the expectations of contemporary audiences.
We knew the performance needed to create an opening for the audience to shift their subject selves from scholarly, outsider, secular, even skeptical, academic critic to something else: something communal and collective (the group gathered together in the chapel), engaged, even embodied; an identity generated temporarily around the experience of the performance, one that would gesture towards what we believed to be an ‘authentic’ experience of the past, an engagement more of feelings than intellect. One of the ways we accomplished this was to invite incoming audience members to choose their sides in the conflict (good vs evil; Christian saint vs. non-Christian villain), by choosing sides of the chapel to sit in, and by engaging vocally with the performance. This was intended playfully, as a way of foregrounding the historical and affective remoteness of the experience, but the result was surprising. This audience enthusiastically embraced this opportunity, animating the space with laughter, whoops and boos, threatening in this way to overtake the performance in interesting ways.
These examples, I hope, illustrate the core of my project, and also, I hope, illustrate the ways in which both affect and tourism studies function in these preliminary questions. I am keenly interested in the way this idea I’m developing – Affect Tourism – invokes the idea of travel to a historic performance site; the idea of scholarly audiences seeking, through this travel, experiences of medieval ‘authenticity,’ and perhaps even seeking experiences that overlay medieval affectivity (religious) onto contemporary secular and/or critical identities. I am also keenly interested, though, in thinking through the concept of tourism emotionally, or put another way, of emotional tourism: what might it mean to willingly visit affective states not one’s own, temporarily perhaps, and especially when engaged communally? What does it mean to imagine one’s self as an Affect Tourist? Can we be tourists of ways of feeling beyond, or perhaps discouraged by,the scholarly or critical identities we build through graduate school and protect so fiercely as professional academics or scholarly experts? How do experiences of the past, in particular, provide openings into productive and important ways of feeling? How might scholarly engagement in medieval historical practices create moments of permission to engage differently, emotionally, relationally? Does this share in what Garth Leon has called, in a different context, “transformative travel,” and if so, what is the transformation? Does this transformation linger? Are there “long-term changes” that we might associate with the experience (Leon 274)? These are the questions of this project.
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. “Affective Economies.” Social Text, vol. 22, no. 4, 2004, pp. 117 – 139.
---. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge, 2004.
---. The Promise of Happiness. Duke University Press, 2010.
Berlant, Lauren, and Jay Prosser. “Life Writing and Intimate Publics: A Conversation with Lauren Berlant." Biography, vol. 34, no. 1, 2011, pp. 180 – 187.
Davidson, Clifford. “Sacred Blood and the Late Medieval Stage.” Comparative Drama, vol. 31, 1997, pp. 436 – 58.
Gibbs, Anna. “Contagious Feelings: Pauline Hanson and the Epidemiology of Affect.” Australian Humanities Review, issue 24, December 2001, http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2001/12/01/contagious-feelings-pauline-hanson-and-the-epidemiology-of-affect. Accessed 18 January 2023.
Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory Seigworth. “An Inventory of Shimmers.” The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth, Duke University Press, 2010, pp. 1 – 25.
Leon, Garth. “The Lingering Moment.” The Cultural Moment in Tourism, edited by Laurajane Smith, Emma Waterton, and Steve Watson, Routledge, 2017, pp. 274 – 291.
McNamer, Sarah. Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.
Prendergast, Thomas A., and Stephanie Trigg. Affective Medievalism: Love, abjection and discontent. Manchester University Press, 2018.
Trigg, Stephanie. “Walking through Cathedrals: Scholars, Pilgrims, and Medieval Tourists.” New Medieval Literatures 7, edited by Wendy Scase, Rita Copeland, David Lawton, Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 9 – 33.
Truran, Wendy J. “Affect Theory.” Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion, edited by Patrick Colm Hogan, Bradley J. Irish, Lalita Pandit Hogan, Routledge, 2022, pp. 26 – 37.
Jacqueline Jenkins is professor of English at the University of Calgary. Her research and teaching address medieval performance and dramatic productions, theatre and performance history, medieval manuscript and textual studies, women's literacy and literary habits, and the patronage, production and transmission of manuscripts for/by women in the late Middle Ages.
