Red heart at dark sites: The production of embodied patriotic ritual in tourism

“Red tourism” serves political and educational functions. It could take dark tourism sites as the spatial basis for constructing the red experience, with patriotism cultivation as the result. Taking the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders as a case study, this research integrates field survey data, spatial luminosity, and user-generated content. It explores how the museum space unifies the spiritual production of body (visual darkness), experience (dark and red experiences), and patriotism, illustrates how the official discourse constructs the sites as a red experience, and demonstrates the process of transforming abstract history into individual psychological experiences through bodily and personal narration. Furthermore, this research constructs an approach from individual to collective emotion and the production mechanism of patriotism. The study offers a new reference for tourism experience and provides a highly representative case and theoretical analysis for “dark” and “red” tourism.