“If you like your history horrible”: The obscene supplementarity of thanatourism

Abstract

By examining witch tourism in Lancashire, England, this paper reveals the ideological role that dark histories fulfil for consumer culture. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, we explore thanatourism as a means for ‘post-historical’ subjects to conceive of wilder, pre-liberal worlds before capitalist realism extinguished all alternatives. Nevertheless, because of how history remains subsumed and consumed commercially, thanatourism works to support rather than subvert tacit endorsement of the neoliberal-capitalist present. Using Derrida and Žižek's theoretical articulations of ‘supplementarity’, we show how thanatourism and its dark historical content is made to function as an ‘obscene supplement’ to the neoliberal-capitalist present through three processes: managed metempsychosis, governed grotesquerie, and curated kitschification. Authenticity within thanatourism remains illusory, but an illusion that nonetheless perpetuates capitalist realism.