Emma Willis's monograph offers a wide-ranging and often moving interrogation of tourism sites and theatrical performances that asks us to engage with “absent others” (2). Her book adds to the burgeoning bibliography on what has come to be called “dark tourism”—those places in the world where traumatic history has been made available to visiting publics as sites of knowledge, mourning, and, in effect, entertainment. Turning on her radio one Saturday, Willis heard an interview with tourism studies scholar Malcolm Foley which left her wondering: “[W]hy our attraction to dark pasts and tragic histories? What is it that we hope to see and understand at such sites? What are the moral and ethical obligations incurred through belated ‘bystanding’ and simulated engagement?” (4). Dark tourism, she suggests, is not simply about “loss” but also leaves us “at a loss” (6, italics in original)—how are we supposed to respond to the historicization and display of unspeakable tragedy, intense grief, and the brutal destruction of human life?
One of the strengths of Willis's book is the confidence with which she engages a breadth of relevant theoretical material. Emmanuel Levinas's idea of an ethical spectatorship predominates in Willis's working through of possible positions for her encounters with so many terrible sites. She writes: “The ethical claim that the absent other makes upon us inhabits a kind of ‘audible silence’, its terms are inassimilable and yet it requires a very real response. It is in the dialectic tension that arises from this positioning of the spectator as audience to the unspeakable that I suggest a point of ethics emerges. This ethics is affective and theatrical in character” (13). But Willis is equally adept in her engagements with other critical thinkers—turning appropriately, at different moments, to Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Rancière, Georges Bataille, Paul Ricoeur, and Judith Butler.
The case study chapters take us to the concentration camps at Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, and Dachau; to the battleground of Củ Chi in Vietnam; to Cambodia's so-called Killing Fields; to Tamaki Heritage Experiences, a tourism spectacle about Māori land loss and the effects of colonization; and, finally, to Rwanda and the history of the genocide of one million or more of the Tutsi people. Willis's own, often deeply personal descriptions of being at these sites are measured and developed by close readings of theatre and performance works created to respond to these same places or events (for example, a range of performances from Jerzy Grotowski's Akropolis to Peter Weiss's The Investigation made in memorialization of the Holocaust). She conceptualizes her project as a contribution to a revitalized understanding of what it means to be a citizen in today's world, and she hopes the book “adds to the efforts to secure the future of humanities as critic and conscience, whose collective insights both hold to account those forces that seek to deny the value of human life, and at the same time dare to imagine a society that is otherwise” (16). Indeed, Willis shows us clearly and critically the ethical problems inevitable in any aestheticization of past traumatic events; a visit to a concentration camp, she notes, is “always ethically compromised” and “our acts of memorialization” inadequate (85). As dark tourism necessarily embeds an entertainment value into trauma, Willis recognizes the dangers of an exploitative gaze.
