Subverting Scotland the Brand: Janice Galloway’s “tourists from the south arrive in the independent state”

In Janice Galloway’s fiction, nationality, if present at all, occupies a place secondary to that of gender issues in the context of turn-of-the-century Scotland. This near absence has rightly been interpreted as a gesture of resistance to male-biased nationalist discourse and to the masculinist version of Scotland found in the works of famous contemporary male fellow-writers. However, Galloway produced a short piece that apparently reversed the “women/gender first” scale of priorities by placing the focus on the national and, even, the transnational context. The present article focuses on a story titled “tourists from the south arrive in the independent state” (1996), a fantasy of an independent Scotland of the future, in which “the tourist gaze” (Urry), articulated in an ungendered third-person plural “they,” is undermined. This gaze (clearly, that of English visitors in this case) was constructed by Scotland’s tourist industry from the 1970s onwards, a process which entailed the commodification of Scottish identity. Scotland and, particularly, its heritage became a brand. The tourists’ expectations are systematically frustrated in the story, which ends with Scottish female characters occupying positions of authority.