The First Tourist Encounters in Mallorca (1837–1842): Colonial Denationalization and Local Resistance in Music and Dance Performance

Abstract

Although tourist performance of local identity has been regarded as an instrument of everyday nation-building from below, this article describes the opposite phenomenon as Mallorca became a tourist destination in the nineteenth century. The island's identity embodied through tourist dance performances, led to denationalization and subaltern silencing in the production process of a Mediterranean and insular exotic otherness of colonial nature. In this respect, this article explains how the host population refused to assume a denationalized local identity, as well as to perform a colonial stereotype through dance.