Romancing Strangers: The Intimate Politics of Beach Tourism in Kenya

338 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008.The tension between institutionalized power---largely rooted in racial hierarchies, and individual power---which is directly contingent upon gender, nationality and socioeconomic status, reveals the contradictions and complex pressures behind interpersonal relationships between Western women and Kenyan men who work in coastal tourism destinations, such as Lamu and Malindi. As such, questions of power and social positionality are both fluid and conditional. I argue that the intimate collisions of these two social groups, not only reflect historical hierarchies between Africa and Europe, but are themselves directly influenced by contemporary geo-political policies and macroeconomic processes. Drawing upon the stories and ethnographic profiles of social actors who are continuously negotiating cultural diversity and a range of personal disparities, including those based on economics, age, race and gender, I explore what happens when Western female tourist enter into cross-cultural relationships with Kenyan beach workers.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD