Segregation and its spectral aftermaths: the semiotics of displacement in Arabian Peninsula tourism infrastructure

Abstract

It has long been noted that segregation is infrastructural: the built environment and the flows of people, goods, and ideas it engenders is often purposed toward demographic separation. Yet infrastructure is both a material and a semiotic intervention in the landscape, reshaping practice as well as affect. In this talk, I examine how the segregation produced through tourism development is affectively experienced, as new infrastructure stimulates recollections of the past and alternative meanings associated with the displacement of community lifeways. This ‘spectral’ dimension to segregating infrastructure is traced through interviews, participant observation, and discourse analysis conducted in Muscat, Oman, and AlUla, Saudi Arabia, where state-led tourism development is privileging capital and separating local peoples from the land – which, rather than a space for community meaning-making, is being refashioned as a tourism destination. In Muscat, luxury hotel development has enclosed the formerly public coastline and today spurs memories of past lifeways, while remaining beaches are haunted by rumors of future privatization. In AlUla, the construction of fences around heritage and conservation sites has excluded residents while fostering narratives of environmental restoration that expand Saudi Arabia’s geopolitical influence. In each case, segregating infrastructure becomes a signifier of the past, generating a spectral landscape wherein new development also marks where a lifeway has been negated through spatial exclusion. Attunement to these ‘spectral registers’ of development landscapes may offer a grounds for resistance, revealing counter-futures opposing the logics of extraction that mobilize segregation.

Dr. Sean P. Smith is an assistant professor in the Department of Culture Studies at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. His research broadly examines how mediated discourse shapes development and transforms relations, especially within the contexts of tourism and the environment. Sean completed his doctorate at the University of Hong Kong in 2021, then joined the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at KU Leuven as a postdoctoral fellow before moving to Tilburg. Drawing upon methods grounded in discourse analysis, social semiotics, and ethnography, he has conducted field research in Myanmar (Burma) and the Arabian Peninsula. His work has been published in journals including Language in Society, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Social Semiotics, and Antipode.