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This chapter explores the proposition that the act of ‘souveniring’ recent and/or ancient places of death, disaster, or atrocities is a more emotionally immersive experience—and thus less cognitively controlled—than in other tourism contexts. We introduce and explore the notion of ‘dark souvenirs’ which encompass unlikely forms, redolent of darkness, emotions, and affective experiences in the dark tourism context of places connected to death, disaster, or atrocities.

The relative simplicity of the term ‘dark tourism’, which has achieved a broad if not contested acceptance within academia and industry alike, is in contrast to the multifaceted nature of the phenomenon. Embedded in this complexity is the association dark tourism makes between the presentation and consumption of death in the context of tourism, as well as the complex relationships humans have with death and mortality—as individuals as well as societies. Tourism has been traditionally explored from a hedonistic perspective and, subsequently, has assumed that consumption of tourism products and destinations predominately serve the purpose of experiencing fun and pleasure (Gnoth, 1997; Malone et al., 2014). Death, conflict, and atrocity sites which elicit sadness, distress, and an inherent sense of danger have been predominately considered deterring factors for tourists (Biran et al., 2014; Buda, 2015a). An important aspect of dark tourism—that of human suffering—has made it difficult to apply traditional tourism motivational theories to its study (Dunkley et al., 2011). Moreover, with the seemingly pleasure-oriented consumption of tourism in places connected to death and tragedy, visits to such sites have been often portrayed as immoral, deviant, or a social pathology (Biran and Poria, 2012; Stone and Sharpley, 2013; also see Chap. 7).

This conceptual article brings to the attention of tourism scholars new possibilities to theorize dark tourism as an affective socio-spatial encounter. To do so, we frame dark tourism within theories of affect and, in particular, geographies of affect. We show how debates around dark tourism terminology and taxonomies, in most cases underlie considerations on felt, affective aspects of the dark tourism experience. We critically debate the concept of affect, the distinctions between affects and emotions, and the complex issue of representability of affect. Our perspective is underpinned by a necessity to consider the context and limitations that frame the affective experience of the tourist and the resulting encounters. This offers a deeper layer of understanding tourists' experiences in death and disaster places as well as the political and ethical charge imbued in such encounters.

This paper contributes methodological discussions on collecting and analysing international tourists’ affects and emotions. The method of data collection used is electronic mail interviews, in some instances corroborated by participant observation in the field, whereas the methods of data analysis employed are affective mapping and emotionality of texts. Such methods of analysis capture the on-flow and contingency of the tourist’s experience in post-disaster places. E-mail interviews are becoming an increasingly widespread method of data collection. In post-disaster contexts, the potential of email interviews allows researchers to conduct fieldwork even when they cannot obtain face-to-face interviews, or in cases in which participants feel more at ease answering from their home and can take their time to respond. Twelve semi-structured e-mail interviews have been conducted in 2016 with international tourists who visited the Tohoku region, Japan, hit in 2011 by a triple disaster: an earthquake, a tsunami, and a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. To explore and better understand participants’ affective and emotional experiences, we exemplify affective mapping and emotionality of texts drawing on tools like linguistic features of e-mails, imagework, short stories and anecdotes.