The Literary Voluntourist: Revisiting NGO Reading Practices

在过去的15年里，旅游业已经成为非政府组织部门的一项繁忙业务，巩固了对间隔年式志愿工作的高需求，以及世界各地非政府组织对自由活动的需求。尽管在人类学和发展研究中已经有了一些对生态旅游的批判性分析，但很少通过文学批判的视角来看待它。这项研究将展示文学和阅读实践如何能够告知和影响旅游者的旅游体验。它将以马拉维为例，作为一个国家，它体现了旅游业的许多典型方面，在这个国家，重新思考旅游业的资源存在，但严重未被利用。我将把旅游者典型的阅读饮食与后殖民文本进行对比，以显示旅游业的后果。然后，我将通过文学方法（包括批判性自传）来解构我作为一名在马拉维的非正式旅游者的经历。最后，我将考虑如何关注阅读什么和如何阅读文学可以改善非正式旅游领域的教育和专业培训。我的建议将通过一个读者反应项目进行测试，在这个项目中，非洲游客阅读马拉维文本。

Voluntourism has become a bustling business in the NGOsector over the last 15 years, consolidating the high demandfor gap year-style voluntary work with the need for freelabour by NGOs across the world. Although there has beensome critical analysis of voluntourism to date withinanthropology and development studies, it has rarely beenviewed through literary critical lenses. This research willshow how literature and reading praxis can inform andinfluence the voluntourist experience. It will take Malawi asits case, as a country which exemplifies many typical aspectsof voluntourism and in which resources for rethinking it arepresent yet drastically underused. I will contrastvoluntourists' typical reading diets with postcolonial textsthat show voluntourism's consequences. I will thendeconstruct my own experience as a voluntourist in Malawithrough literary methods, including critical autobiography.Finally, I will consider how attention to what, and how,literature is read could improve pedagogy and professionaltraining in the voluntourist field. My proposals will be testedby a reader-response project in which voluntourists read aMalawian text.