The cultural politics of hospitality: hosts and guests in foreign language coursebooks for tourism

This article aims at critically addressing the role of language in highly sensitive “contact zones”, such as the wide variety of encounters framed by tourist mobilities. It will particularly focus on the representations of these encounters disseminated by foreign language coursebooks for tourism purposes – a text genre which is generally hardly recognized as a tourism genre, but which is, in fact, as much responsible as any guidebook or travel phrasebook for the construction of “otherness”, and for the consolidation of tourist-host identities and performances through the (pre-)configuration of communicative exchanges. Drawing on a selection of English and German language coursebooks, the analysis further attempts at providing insight into the way they replicate and reinforce the ideology, power relationships and the cultural politics of hospitality underlying the world of contemporary tourism.