Christina M. Ceisel's Globalized Nostalgia: Tourism, Heritage, and the Politics of Place examines how local heritage is being marketed globally. Ceisel's book is one of eight volumes in Routledge's Qualitative Inquiry and Social Justice series edited by Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln. Ceisel's work extends her 2013 University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign doctoral dissertation from 2006 to 2018 in the autonomous community of Galicia on the northwest coast of Spain with focus on its capital Santiago de Compostela, a medieval Catholic pilgrimage site. Ceisel engages family narrative, government policy, and popular cultural texts in assorted subjectivities ranging from scholar to self while using interpretive methods informed by performance autoethnography. Ceisel explains, "Such a method allows for various, forms of knowledge, moving between scholarly, to experiential and anecdotal" (10). The flexibility of this approach provides a cognitively complex view on her subject without being pedantic.
In chapter one, Ceisel introduces readers to the City of Culture of Galicia. Built on a mountain overlooking Santiago de Compostela, it was envisioned as a local community center and global attention/investment magnet but after 2008's economic crisis it was perceived as vanity project. Ceisel frames each subsequent chapter through the perspective of her exploring a different feature of the city. Ceisel states that the goal of her performance autoethnography lies in exploring how local and global interests have commodified and capitalized upon the Galician cultural heritage and (national) identity in order to examine how we might avoid fossilizing local cultures in service of neoliberalism.
Chapter two orients readers to the author's frame of reference via a visit to The Library and Archive of Galicia. Here, Ceisel takes the perspective of the passionate collector of culture as she weaves elements of her personal and family history together with Galicia's cultural and political past. Ceisel deftly demonstrates how her Cuban roots and family's personal narratives culturally oriented her, first towards Europe, via popular film, and then to Galicia, Spain, as a student, in search of authentic cultural identity and transformation. Ceisel's notes how her language tutor Samuel, "He describes the [Galician] word morriña. There is no translation in Castilian (or English) for the term; it describes the particular longing Galician immigrants have for their homeland" (32). Instead, Ceisel finds in that the delineated cultural maps of Spain that she initially carries mentally are complicated by a history of hybridizing colonization, political suppression of non-Castilian identities, and by various stakeholders for whom local culture, tradition, and heritage are a means to disparate socio-economic and lifestyle goals.
A visit to Gaiás Centre Museum, a place meant to embody Galician heritage but a building constructed to look homogenously global, introduces Ceisel's discussion of the implications of packaging local products (and nationalist politics) for global consumption in chapter three. Here Ceisel uses performative writing to explore different modes of scholarly representation as guided by the work of performance and (auto)ethnography scholars Dwight Conquergood, Ronald Pelias, and Desiree Yomtoob. Ceisel explores the cultural economy of water, boards tourist trains and considers Galician nationality, economics, and politics within the context of a global marketplace as she performs international scholar in the guise of a local wine and seafood enthusiast as describes an interview with a television crew covering a scallop festival noting, "I answer questions about what brought me to the festival - what brought me here (rather than 'the use of nationalist imagery in festivals,' I reply that I really like scallops)" (65). Such experience heightens Ceisel's awareness of how profitable heritage is, but more so, it is politicly ambiguous, as the rise of populist politics demonstrates how heritage can be pressed into the service of xenophobia and closed borders.
The political implications of and profit potential in patrimony are carried through the fourth chapter that Ceisel introduces with a visit to the Centre for Cultural Innovation where she explores how technology is being used to preserve traditional labor even as that labor is then commodified into a tourist activity. Using an autoethnographic ethnodrama that features the voices of others (i.e., professionals, laborers, academics, celebrities, and herself as author, scholar, visitor, viewer) to examine how transnational media (i.e., television/publishing) freeze and globally commodify Galician cultural labor just as transnational companies might freeze and export local seafood, meat, and/or produce. While watching food/travel documentarian Anthony Bourdain present a vision Spain as food regions, Ceisel posits, "Narratives of heritage and authenticity - narratives of nostalgia - factor into these tales as expertise is based on a combination of experiences and nativism (82)." Ceisel speaks back to the culturally gentrified image of Spain that is both beguiling to outsiders and likely culturally stifling to locals.
Ceisel discusses a public television series featuring Spanish food and wine headed by a chef, since accused of sexual harassment and misconduct, who I will refrain from naming. Having this individual and Bourdain, both white, cis, males, serve as the arbiters of culinary heritage and authenticity underscores Ceisel's earlier point about the political ambiguity of heritage. In contrast, Ceisel speaks to the mariscadoras, shellfish collecting women's cooperatives, who despite their longstanding connection with the region and its seafood industry, face vandalism, harassment, and attacks from local poachers, while international media frame their work "as natural and a gift, pleasurable, and relaxing - combined with the U.S. American view of the Mediterranean lifestyle as carefree" (98).Thus, Ceisel argues, when locals protest against EU austerity measures the US perception is that locals are lazy handout seekers.
Ceisel's penultimate visit in the City of Culture of Galicia is the Centre for Creative Enterprising of Galicia (chapter five), followed by The Cantina (conclusions/chapter six). This center, as a neoliberal construct, is a means by which local cultural workers can brand/market local products and practices under transnational (i.e., European Union) appellation policies to grow the economy and attract global investment that could end up displacing the same locals this process was established to support. Ceisel takes the interpretive voice of the in-flight reader of an airline magazine featuring the Galicia region from seat 22 B. This interpretive voice would be more nuanced in a live performance space.
Ceisel's impromptu interactions with locals working outside of EU appellation schemes demonstrates locals self-determining the value of their labor/products from a local couple who make unlicensed Albariño wine at home, to a grocer who gives garden grown spices versus selling dried spice simulacra, and an independent farmer valuing his non-appellation heritage blonde cows of Galicia. The farmer tells Ceisel besides EU appellations being costly hassles, that, "[...] his customers knew that the meat would be good. They knew him and the butcher, he sold it locally" (127). As more of the industrialized world exists outside of their own food production chains, EU food label stickers, for some customers, intimate a promise of something that is impossible (i.e., to be integrated into and to possess an authentic food culture and/or its environs, if only mentally).
In her concluding observations Ceisel observes, "If the preservation of heritage and authenticity are the (or a) goal of an enterprise, this brings up important, confusing, and contradictory questions about who can perform labor, where and to what ends" (140). In reading this quote I cannot help but reflect about how accurate appellations and designators such as 'locally sourced' are given the amount of cultural, geographical, economic, and psychological displacement that is involved in commodifying local heritage for a global market. Furthermore, Ceisel's point about the political ambiguity of heritage, taken together with the ability for transnational and globalizing forces to dictate what aspects of local culture are preserved, based on their profitability, conjures a frightening (re)envisioning of history as written from the comfort of standpoints accustomed to the historical present.
— Reviewed by Gordon Alley-Young, Kingsborough Community College — City University of New York
Gordon Alley-Young is a Professor of Speech Communication at Kingsborough Community College — City University of New York. His research explores intercultural communication, popular culture, and critical socio-cultural perspectives on identity and education. His most recent essay "Secret Superhero in a Black Burka: A Cultural Analysis of Identity Politics, Representation, and Impact in the Burka Avenger" appears in Ghabra, Alaoui, Abdi, and Calafell's Negotiating Identity and Transnationalism: Middle Eastern and North African Communication and Critical Cultural Studies (2020, Peter Lang).
