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Safe Distance, Dark Tourism, and Ambivalent Spatial Relation in Gillian Plowman’s Yours Abundantly, From Zimbabwe, and Christine Evans’s Trojan Barbie

Abstract Colonial adventures and imperialistic travels have taken a new pattern as in the cases of humanitarian travel and dark tourism in the twenty-first century. Dark tourism not only satisfies Western individual’s hunger for orientalism labeling the touristic site a marginal and exotic landscape, but also uncovers the touristic undercurrents involved in the voyage. In this article, by utilizing the immediacy of the theatre genre, I argue that dramatic literature shares similar ambivalent spatial relations with humanitarian travel in that they both locate themselves between proximity and remoteness in their relation to the other. Similarly, by staging metatheatrical aspects, Plowman’s Yours Abundantly, From Zimbabwe and Christine Evans’s Trojan Barbie underline the spectral feature of theatre blurring the distinction between reality and performance, distance and closeness. Thanks to this self-referentiality, the plays create a distance between the actresses and the spectators and, simultaneously, establishes a bond through the protagonists’ endeavor to present a remote story that instigates empathy from the audience. Written in two sections, my article first explores the concept of dark tourism and the genre’s overlap with this ambiguous relationship between distance and proximity in humanitarianism, and then does a close reading of both plays.