Fifth International Conference on Tourism & Leisure Studies

Abstract

This rhetorical analysis project examines manifestations of the uncanny at tourist sites and events in Sleepy Hollow, NY, a village building a year-round tourism industry themed around “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” In Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving’s 1819 tale of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman forms the basis for a Halloween season tourism industry. Placemakers from the village’s government and local historical societies are in the midst of an eighteen-month bicentennial celebration around Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” to encourage year-round tourism. These efforts continue to evolve throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The bicentennial and associated infrastructure developments in and around the village mark an opportunity for the village’s major institutions to reinforce but also re-situate the legacies of Irving and his “legend” for the current political and cultural climate and the needs of today’s Sleepy Hollow community and visitors. Through a combination of rhetorical analysis, ethnographic fieldwork, and affect theory literature, this project develops the concept of uncanny tourism as a practical placemaking strategy. Affects experienced through the body hold rhetorical power, particularly in the themed spaces of tourism. This means that both embodiment and affect are vital considerations for those who design, manage, and study tourist spaces. In Sleepy Hollow, uncanny affect, which recurs in Irving’s text and the area’s tourist sites, functions rhetorically to further certain views of death, familiarity or homeliness, and the supernatural, as well as reinforces the town’s authority to reproduce the uncanny.