Snipped, Sectioned, Siloed: Arts of Unequal Development in Tourist Goa

As a leading global ‘industry,’ tourism is acknowledged to have ‘world-making agency.’ Tourism-related scholarship routinely emphasises the importance of visual experience in moulding consumer anticipation and in designing ‘place making’ strategies. Yet, the polyfunctional capacities of aesthetics in tourist locations are under-theorised. Moving beyond the binary framework that casts tourism-aesthetics as either co-opted or subversive, this paper argues that under tourism-capitalism, aesthetics are structurally made to perform contradictory roles that are bound up with agendas circumscribing their political efficacy. It identifies (1) appropriated polyfunctionality and (2) encoded polyfunctionality as two operational modes of tourism-aesthetics. Bridging cultural analysis and critical political economy, the paper illustrates this framework through a case-study of the artwork of Mario Miranda, a small fraction of whose oeuvre has been widely utilised to brand Goa, one of India’s foremost tourism destinations. Mobilising empirical material obtained via ethnographic and archival means, the paper shows that art is capable of both obscuring and exposing the contradictions of tourism-led uneven development, even as there remain significant structural limits to artists’ ability either to conceptualise or to represent the relationship of tourism to capitalism.