Reframing tourism labour: Alterity and the global south

Abstract

Extant literature recognises that knowledge and conceptualisations of tourism labour vis-a-vis the Global South are deficient and inappropriately theoretically framed by hegemonic and incommensurate Western ontologies and epistemes. This article aims to generate a decolonial, authentic and indigenous theoretical basis to liberate tourism labour knowledge of the Global South from this epistemic subordination through a contemporary review and reflection. We thus appropriate, problematise and extend Levinas' theory of alterity to reframe the colonial and neoliberal literature on the Global South's tourism workforce by championing ‘We’ as the convergence and co-existence of the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’ through thematic, epistemic, methodological, and representational alterities.