The touristification of tea estates in Sri Lanka: commodifying labor

Abstract

Tea tourism in Sri Lanka brings together two of its biggest industries, the tea plantation and tourism industry, in the global production of locality. The intersection of the tea and tourism industry is also the intersection of the nation’s colonial history and its postcolonial investment in global capitalism and in the formation of a national identity. ‘Tea culture’ and the tourists’ enchantment with tea has gradually moved from the product to the producer. It is not merely the labor of the individual, but the worker itself that becomes aestheticized for profit. This visibility of the tea estate worker as a symbol of Sri Lankan tourism and hospitality perpetuates the invisibility of their citizenship struggle, repatriation to India, ethnic violence, landlessness, and other harsh realities. Within tea tourism, the fetishization and the commodification of the ‘tea estate worker experience’ for the creation of postcolonial neoliberal profit and cultural value stems from the investment of the nation state in global modernity. The branding of the tea estate worker as a national symbol and the restructuring of oppression in market spaces becomes a colonial epilogue in which postcolonial subjects continue to consume.