Abstract

Dark tourism encapsulates travel to sites of death, disaster, and atrocity where remembrance and commercialization intersect. Framed as both a multidisciplinary field and an interpretive lens, it examines how visitor economies curate the “significant dead” through memorials, museums, exhibitions, and themed attractions; mediating difficult heritage while revealing contemporary attitudes toward mortality, identity, and collective memory. The entry distinguishes consumption-focused analyses of dark tourism from production-oriented perspectives on dark or difficult heritage and situates debate within postdisciplinary conversations across archaeology, heritage studies, and cultural sociology. It traces how “deathscapes” and “traumascapes” acquire meaning through social negotiation and models developmental trajectories via Foote’s continuum of rectification, designation, sanctification, and obliteration, noting the contingent roles of stakeholders, policy, and public sentiment. These sites are politically and morally charged: They embody dissonant narratives, selective silences, and shifting ideologies, and they must manage dialogic, inclusive interpretation for diverse audiences while resisting erasure. Ultimately, dark tourism domesticates death within culturally sanctioned spaces, retailing tragic memories yet often telling us more about the living than about the dead. As heritage systems globalize, dark tourism’s consumption will increasingly operate alongside heritage production, democratizing and internationally circulating narratives of the noteworthy dead within contemporary visitor economies.