Postcolonial Aeromobilities. Branding, Cultural Governance, and Tourism Imageries
Bart Paul Vanspauwen and Iñigo Sánchez-Fuarros (eds.)
Routledge, 2025
This edited collection explores how national airlines in postcolonial states operate at the complex intersection of corporate branding, cultural governance, tourism development, and national identity formation. It conceptualizes airplanes and airports as both tangible infrastructural spaces and symbolic domains that connect geographically distant regions while embodying aspirations of political sovereignty and cultural unity. Through diverse case studies spanning multiple continents, the book examines how commercial aviation’s physical and cultural spaces either reinforce or challenge colonial histories and imperial legacies.
The volume reveals how modern Western imperial narratives were shaped through specific cultural and social negotiations that played out in airline branding, route networks, service standards, and cultural policies. It analyzes how airlines serve as vehicles for projecting soft power and cultural diplomacy while mediating between local traditions and global modernity. Drawing on rich empirical examples from Angola, Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Jamaica, Kenya, France, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Lebanon, México, Peru, South Africa, Turkey, and the United States, this collection demonstrates how airlines employ sophisticated cultural management and corporate branding strategies to shape national and regional identities.
By examining airlines as sites where business strategy, cultural policy, and identity politics intersect, this collection advances our understanding of how transportation infrastructure shapes social imaginaries and power relations in our increasingly connected yet culturally diverse world. The research has important implications for scholars of business history, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, and transportation geography, while offering practical insights for policy makers and airline industry leaders
Access the book’s webpage here
Ambiance, Tourism and the City
Iñigo Sánchez-Fuarros, Daniel Paiva and Daniel Malet Calvo (eds.)
Routledge, 2023
Ambiance, Tourism and the City considers how tourism and urban development affect the lived ambiances of contemporary cities around the world. As most of the existing literature on sensory atmospheres says little about the intersection between tourism and atmospheric production, this book affirms the centrality of the notion of ambiance as a mode of inquiry into the making and remaking of urban places for tourist consumption.
The book takes the reader into the sensory worlds of a traditional Italian marketplace, a jungle park in Kuala Lumpur, a slum in the Colombian city of Medellín, or the «sun and sand’ tourism destinations in Southern Spain, among other case studies. It offers new insights into the impact of tourism on the urban environment from multidisciplinary perspectives and a wide range of geographical regions across Europe, North America, Asia and South America. Through these contemporary case studies, the book further deepens our understanding of the ways in which «ambiances» and «atmospheres» pervade the physical regeneration and sensory transformation of contemporary tourist destinations. Conversely, this book offers insights on the effects of tourism on everyday urban experience.
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Cubaneando en Barcelona. Música, migración y experiencia urbana
Editorial CSIC, 2012
Resulting from ethnographic work with the Cuban diaspora in Barcelona, this book discusses the importance of music in the production of social spaces in the context of the host society and their role in creating and maintaining a sense of belonging despite the dislocation that comes with migration. For Cubans, music represents an important material and symbolic space in which they can meet and with which they identify. This study takes a fresh look at the situation of migrants in Spain, putting the focus on the diaspora’s expressive culture, an aspect that tends to be overlooked by the social sciences that have addressed this issue. The trans disciplinary vocation of the study, which takes its logical structure, also hosts other approaches such as those derived from performance, urban and dance studies, suggesting the potential of the subject, and connecting to the latest international ethno-musicological practices.
French translation here