The production of tourism in Ponta Negra,Northeast Brazil: policies,representations and logics of desire

This article discusses how the beach neighbourhood of Ponta Negra (Natal, RN), in the Northeast of Brazil, came to experience the intensive tourist development that now characterises it. Its origins as a fishing village, its gradual emergence as a local resort and the internationalisation of its tourism in the late twentieth century are examined. The discussion of this process demonstrates how public policies have played a major role not only in configuring the model of spatial planning and urbanisation that was adopted, but also in defining Europe as the main geographical focus of tourist internationalisation, in creating attractive conditions for foreign investment, and in the construction and dissemination of a tourist identity largely founded on past images and desires. At the same time, this discussion of Ponta Negra’s tourist-capitalist appropriation, Europeanisation and its (re)production as a site of racialised desires contributes to a better understanding of the ambivalent spatialities and multiple tensions that coexist in the neighbourhood today. The analysis presented here draws on empirical data collected during a period of ethnographic fieldwork in which the predominant methodologies included participant observation, semi-structured interviews and documental and statistical research.     

From Europe with passion: frameworks of the touristic male desire of Ponta Negra,in the North-East of Brazil

Based upon multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, this article debates the constitution of a particular type of transatlantic touristic flows from the European continent to the cosmopolitan beach neighbourhood of Ponta Negra, in Natal, capital city of the state of Rio Grande do Norte in the North-East of Brazil. These flows are predominantly male and are quite evidently permeated by issues related to passion, personal relations and sexual intimacy. The main objective of the analysis is to attempt to map and understand the most influential social and cultural frameworks (biographical paths of intimacy, gender relationships, subjectivities, the production and circulation of representations of Brazil, homosociabilities) in the definition and substantiation of the foreign male tourist's desire to visit Ponta Negra. It thus constitutes an attempt to socially and culturally locate the option of travelling to this leisure destination, on the part of both first-time visitors and the numerous individuals who repeatedly visit Ponta Negra over the years.