Coloniality, tourism and city-branding as an apparatus of forgetting in Dunedin, Aotearoa New Zealand

This chapter analyses contemporary tourism in Dunedin, Aotearoa New Zealand, as a form of colonial tourism productive of an apparatus of forgetting. I argue that despite the material presence of settler colonisation in the tourist sites and built landscapes of Dunedin, city-branding works to discursively and institutionally forget this city’s violent and racist settler colonial history. I analyse both officially sanctioned tourist spaces identified by the Dunedin City Council (DCC), such as the Railway Station, the Botanic Garden, and Larnach Castle, as well as independently run tourist endeavours such as ghost tours, as constitutive of an apparatus (in the Foucauldian sense) that reproduces an institutionally sanctioned version of Dunedin’s history. City-branding prioritises Dunedin’s Anglocentric heritage and facilitates a settler colonial version of colonial tourism by normalising settler rather than Indigenous presence in the city.