The Occupying Gaze: Wartime Tourism and the Establishment of American Hegemony

Andrew Buchanan will discuss the fact that the hundreds of thousands of American military personnel who served in Italy during World War II all had opportunity to function, to various degrees, as tourists, whose performance of tourism was encouraged by military authorities.  The great expansion of American tourism in Italy thus occurred not after the war, as is customarily thought, but during it, and sex tourism, mass tourism, and cultural tourism were all included in soldier-tourism.   Moreover, this performance was not a neutral exercise, but was deeply intertwined with the normalization and legitimization of military conquest and occupation, and it helped to pave the way for Italy’s incorporation into a postwar order headed by the United States.  Soldier tourism was a semi-official part of Allied military governance in Italy, serving simultaneously to reinforce perceptions of American superiority, to appropriate key elements of Italian history and culture, and to render it legible for domestic opinion within the United States.  Like much oversees tourism, it was an encounter with an exoticized other; in this case, however, the tourists were members of a victorious and occupying army, and their work as informal ambassadors helped to solidify their government’s emerging predominance.