[Review] : Gorsuch, Anne E. All this is your world : Soviet tourism at home and abroad after Stalin

Abstract

This book provides an analysis of a peculiar and highly political issue—tourism under Soviet socialism. Since E. Said’s Orientalism, issues of otherness, difference, power and representation have become some of the central issues in social science. The Orient, along with other ‘Western’ authorised forms of otherness such as the Balkans, Eastern Europe and Russia, has provoked fantasies both of fear and of fascination, has contributed towards defining the imagined community of ‘us Europeans’ and has established an alleged European superiority. The orientalising discourses and intellectual Western practices that produced static, singular and persistent images of the Balkans, Russia and Eastern Europe have been unmasked and deconstructed by many authors.