This presentation considers how affects animate and uphold tourism and settler colonialism. Engaging a “curious” postdisciplinary research methodology informed by the relational power of listening, I trace the emergence of two interrelated atmospheres in the city of Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada, both of which exemplify how settler colonialism is built and maintained as a structure of feeling (Robinson, 2014) that supports larger processes of worldmaking via tourism.The first tracing details the ephemeral sublime and sonic workings of the Niagara Falls Falls Firework Series (a nightly fireworks display that runs during peak tourism season) and the general use of fireworks to mark national projects of belonging. 

The second tracing considers the silent spectacle of the Falls Illumination, a nightly practice of lighting the Falls in varying colours. These illuminations feature “representations” of particular causes through simply-coloured lighting arrangements, while surreptitiously obscuring the actual meaning of any individual lighting display. These two interrelated displays occur explicitly as part of an agenda of attractions designed to encourage tourism to the Canadian city of Niagara Falls, and thus fully operate to normalize national affective practices (Stephens, 2016) and settler atmospherics (Simmons, 2019) through tourism and tourism worldmaking.

 In detailing these two atmospheres and their effects, I illuminate the mechanisms and practices through which tourism-related atmospheric infrastructures overtly and covertly contribute to worldmaking; exemplify how settlers might learn to destabilize, disrupt, or diffuse such atmospherics in and through tourism as a practice of unsettling; and expand on the literature detailing how we might research affective, embodied, and atmospheric moments of tourism. I take inspiration from related critical, interventionist, and narrative work in tourism and build on it to suggest that unsettling tourism—or tourism worldmaking—must be oriented toward mediating agencies of worldmaking like light and sound