Living and Imagining in Paradise: The Culture of a Tourist Economy

After establishing the neocolonial relations of tourism and the various forms of resistance alternative models as represented in Caribbean literature, chapter four offers a case study of a tourist economy by analyzing the production of culture and tourism in the Bahamas (one of the most tourism-dependent countries in the region). It engages how Caribbean writers and cultural workers in local spaces work to resist the power of tourism and myth of paradise. This chapter combines an analysis of selected literary works by Marion Bethel and artistic works by Dionne Benjamin-Smith, the national festival Junkanoo, interviews conducted with workers in tourism and culture. Bahamian artists and cultural workers, including workers in the tourist and culture industries and artists, acknowledge the powerful role of tourism in shaping identity and national culture, but they have different strategies of negotiating tourism depending on their relationship to the tourist industry.

Resisting Paradise—An Introduction

The introductory chapter positions tourism as a neocolonial enterprise in which globalization and U.S. imperialism are implicated along with the history of slavery and colonialism. It argues that tourism is one of the most powerful conduits of neocolonialism not only because of economic and political reasons, but also because tourism drastically shapes the socio-cultural landscape of the region. The chapter demonstrates the intersections among tourism and diaspora studies and issues of consumption, mobility, culture, sexuality, and sexual labor. Many critics of tourism are referenced in order to trace the legacy of slavery and colonialism found in the tourist industry, which emerges in economic, socio-political, cultural, and sexual terms. The sexual-cultural politics of tourism are introduced as well the sites of resistance and the methodology and feminist postcolonial framework of “resisting paradise.”

Rethinking Sites of Caribbean Rebellion and Freedom

The book ends with a deeper reflection on what it means to understand sites of resistance and rebellion through an analysis the potential of art tourism and the politics of sex and sexual labor in the Caribbean within the context of this overwhelming production of paradise. The investigation of resisting paradise is pushed further through other sites of rebellion and assertions of cultural and sexual freedom. The potential new model of art and culture tourism is examined in the Bahamas at Baha Mar Resorts and The Current Art Team and their work in creating space and empowering local artists. The chapter also includes the troubling issue of sex and sexuality within the context of paradise in order to search for another site of resistance through a rethinking of sexual labor, transactional sex, and sexual agency. Through auto-ethnography and Kamala Kempadoo’s work on Caribbean sexuality and tourism, the author explores the tensions and contending forces of sexuality and respectability and how they are deeply complicated through tourism.

Vexed Relations: The Interplay of Culture, Race, and Sex

This chapter considers the work of three Caribbean writers Michelle Cliff, Oonya Kempadoo, and Christian Campbell, who grapple with the complexity of culture, race, and sex within the overwhelming context of neocolonial tourism and globalization. Cliff’s novel No Telephone to Heaven represents post-independence Jamaica from the 1960s to the 1980s during the rise of tourism as the model for development. The novel carefully exposes the exploitative cultural and sexual consumption of the Caribbean through representing the ways in which Jamaica and its people are packaged and sold in the film and tourist industries. Kempadoo’s novel’s Tide Running offers a seductive challenge to neocolonialism through a sharp critique of the sexual and cultural politics of tourism and the adverse effects of globalization on the island of Tobago. Through subtle and powerful metaphors, Campbell’s poems, “Groove” and “Welcome Centre” reveal the profound influence of tourism on Caribbean sexual and cultural identity, unsilencing the sexual/gendered aspects of tourist exploitation in the Bahamas.

Black Female Travel: Diasporic Connections and Revolutionary Desire

The Caribbean American writers examined in chapter three, Paule Marshall and Audre Lorde, seek a spiritual home in the Caribbean, the home of their parents and ancestors. More specifically, they write and thereby claim multiple homes in transnational spaces through the Caribbean and an African diasporic identity. Both Marshall and Lorde directly challenge neocolonial discourse and tourism by creating alternative Black female travel narratives that represent diasporic travel, identity, and multiple homespaces. They both introduce new forms of tourism and possibilities for resistance to neocolonialism, while uncovering the strong continuities between the racial, sexual, and gender dynamics of colonialism (and slavery) and neocolonialism (and tourism).

Negotiating Tropical Desires in Social and Physical Landscapes

Chapter five offers another case study of a tourist dependent economy and local resistance to paradise discourse in Jamaica while focusing on the negotiations of what Krista Thompson describes as a “tropical landscape of desire.” This chapter examines the multifaceted approach to challenging neocolonialism and participation in “resistance culture” by Jamaican writer, activist, and scholar Erna Brodber. Brodber utilizes both creative work and cultural activism to resist exploitative consumption of the Caribbean; in the novel Myal and research project Blackspace and Educo-tourism. This chapter also considers the work of Jamaican filmmaker Esther Figueroa in her documentary Jamaica For Sale about tourism, unsustainable development, and the impact on the environment and working class Jamaicans. In comparing these two very different responses to the burden of paradise, this chapter offers an analysis of how environment and class work to complicate cultural and political activism and desire for ethical and non-exploitative relations within and through a tourism dependent economy.

Caribbean Migrant Writers and the Politics of Return

Chapter two focuses on well-known Afro-Caribbean women writers, Jamaica Kincaid and Edwidge Danticat, who reside in the United States and make a significant contribution to “resistance culture.” Through narratives of return, Kincaid and Danticat challenge exploitative consumption and tourism in their literary works by exposing and utilizing the power that lies in the production of history. They do this by using their mobility and prominence in North American literary markets to inform potential tourists and fellow Caribbeans abroad of the injustices of the tourist industry that are rooted in the history of slavery and colonialism. Kincaid directly confronts and criticizes the tourist industry in her satirical essay/memoir A Small Place; while Danticat participates in and critiques the tourist industry with her travel guide/memoir After the Dance. They produce alternative travel narratives that resist the travel guide genre, which has historically defined “natives” (the other) outside of history, modernity, and humanity.