At the resort: Southeast Asian tourist workers and regimes of global citizenship

Abstract

International five-star tourist resorts are arguably distinctive cultural sites that can reveal much about the logics of globalisation. The Malaysian resort that is the subject of this article is a multi-layered cultural site that seeks to evoke an imagined memory of colonial idyll and local authenticity. It is at the same time a site of complex regimes of global citizenship. Both guests and workers, it turns out, are members of a mobile, transnational cosmopolitan class. But they do not enjoy the same privileges of citizenship. Such resorts evidence a growing international system of multi-tiered regimes of global citizenship in a climate where states have become adept at managing the interf..