Postcolonial Tourism

Literature, Culture, and Environment

Anthony Carrigan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136833915
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is the first literary study of postcolonial tourism. Looking at the cultural and ecological effects of mass tourism development in highly exoticized island states that are still grappling with the legacies of western colonialism, Carrigan contends that postcolonial writers not only dramatize the industry's most exploitative operations but also provide blueprints toward sustainable tourism futures. By locating this argument in the context of interdisciplinary tourism research, the study shows how imaginative literature can extend some of this field's key theoretical concepts while making an important contribution to the interface between postcolonial studies and ecocriticism. The book also presents a framework for analyzing how an industry that is subject to constant media attention and involves a huge proportion of the global population shapes the cultural, social, and environmental milieux of postcolonial texts.

Part I
Tourism and Nature

1 Visual Perception and Touristed Landscapes

Recent research into tourism’s effects on island ecologies has led to some extremely worrying observations. For instance, Stefan Gössling’s empirical study on ‘human–environmental relations’ in Zanzibar—a Tanzanian archipelago located on the east African coast—supports suggestions that tourism is acting as ‘an agent of modernization, which decontextualizes and dissolves the relationships individuals have with society and nature, and increases the separation from structures that are the base of sustainable human–environmental relations’ (2002: 550). He notes that the ironic situation in which tourism increases environmental awareness while facilitating the ‘consumption and depletion of natural resources, both directly and indirectly, locally and globally’ (554) shows no sign of abating. One reason for this, Gössling suggests, is that tourism is a ‘self-reinforcing process’ (553) which not only generates income for local hosts through the implementation of unsustainable practices but also increases hosts’ desire to travel. At the same time, local communities that are increasingly orientated around tourism become divorced from traditional environmental ethics. In this light, he concludes bleakly that:

a cosmopolitan configuration of the self through tourism might off-set the individual perception of being responsible for unsustainable environmental change. Sustainable tourism—the notion that its development can be managed in an environmentally neutral way—might thus be a contradiction in terms.

(554)

This is interesting not least because many of the writers in this study embrace various ‘cosmopolitan configuration[s]’—especially through their experiences of work and travel—yet still demonstrate deep engagements with issues that motivate environmental sustainability planning. Their depictions of local community practices in particular expose the tensions inherent in Gössling’s conclusion, and speak to wider environmental concerns within tourism studies regarding how ‘sustainability [ . . . ] is not easy to translate into specific actions that individuals or governments can undertake’ (McLaren 2003: 100). My aim in Part I of this book is to assess the extent to which postcolonial portrayals of tourism in island environments support Gössling’s argument. I begin in this chapter by examining how two Caribbean writers, Jamaica Kincaid and Derek Walcott, oppose paradisal stereotypes by recontextualizing touristed landscapes in their respective homelands (Antigua and St Lucia). Emphasizing the cultural and ideological processes that surround these landscapes’ representation, the chapter’s argument centres as much on modes of visualization as on the subjects of the tourist, native, and writerly gaze, pinpointing aspects of what might be termed a postcolonial ‘ethics of seeing’ in touristed environments.

Mythologizing Place and Gazing on Paradise

It has become commonplace in discussions of space, place, and natural environments to understand them as inextricably tied to human activities and ideologies. Since the publication of Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels’s seminal volume on landscape iconography, in which they claim that landscape should be understood ‘as a cultural symbol or image’ that can, like a text, be read (1988: 1), landscape commentators have become highly attentive to meanings endowed through human activity and representations. Helen Tiffin addresses this well from an ecocritical perspective when she argues that:

While the ontological existence of nature-in-itself is an indisputable fact, the term ‘landscape’ both denotes and connotes more than simply ‘land’ or ‘earth’. An observer, an attitude to land, a point of view are implied, such that ‘landscape’ is necessarily a product of a combination of relationships between living beings and their surroundings. In the case of human beings, ‘landscape’ becomes a form of interaction between people and their place, in large part a symbolic order expressed through representation.

(2005: 199)

Guided by these arguments, I address how tourism has affected real and imagined island landscapes from the position that no landscape can be considered wholly ‘natural’: the ways in which different landscapes are constituted depends on the modes and levels of human interaction they experience.

Although Tiffin asserts that nature’s ‘ontological existence’ is an ‘indisputable fact’, ‘nature’ is notoriously difficult to define, not least because ‘the one thing that is not “natural” is nature [it]self’ (Soper 1995: 1; 7). My conceptual approach to nature and the natural environment coincides with my understanding of landscape, as their discursive mediation and instrumental use by human communities always implicates culture in ‘natural’ processes. The dynamic material as well as textual entanglements that result from this can be seen as enabling human activities, including aesthetic production (Mukherjee 2010: Chapter 3). Following Phil Macnaghten and John Urry’s influential claim that ‘there is no singular “nature” as such, only a diversity of contested natures [ . . . ] constituted through a variety of socio-cultural processes’ (1998: 1), my interests centre on how conflicts over natural environments affect sustainability issues, especially from the perspective of ideological contestation. These concerns are particularly relevant to discussions of ecotourism (see Chapter 2), which has been read as a ‘western construct’ whose ‘ethnocentric bias [ . . . ] ignores the fact that there are “multiple natures” constructed variously by different societies’ (Cater 2006: 32). Such practices tend to fetishize a specific notion of nature, reflecting the ‘wilderness’ ideals exhibited in brochure discourse and detaching natural processes from local cultural mediations.

In this light, it is deeply ironic that part of tropical islands’ allure to tourists depends on perceiving their natural environments as ‘pristine’, ‘untouched’, or ‘virgin’. The ideological construction of paradise as ‘a peaceful unspoilt place’ (OED 3.a.) is vital to island marketing strategies, even as the presence of tourism necessarily disrupts these romanticized ideals. Such persistent fetishization endows islands with what Rob Shields calls ‘place mythology’. For Shields, a place-image derives from ‘a widely disseminated and commonly held set of images of a place or space’, affecting how ‘various discrete meanings’ become ‘associated with real places or regions regardless of their character in reality’ (1991: 60). An array of place-images contributes collectively to the formation of a ‘place-myth’ (61). These myths have ‘both a constancy and a shifting quality’ as ‘the core images change slowly over time, are displaced by radical changes in the nature of a place, and as various images simply lose their connotative power [ . . . ] while others are invented, disseminated, and become accepted in common parlance’ (61). This notion is especially relevant to the construction of islands in brochure discourse, which consistently subordinates local lived experience to visitors’ fantasies. Despite Walcott’s salutary reminder—if one were needed—in his Nobel acceptance speech that ‘[t]he Caribbean is not an idyll, not to its natives’ (1998a: 83), the ‘seductive’ appeal of island landscapes remains ‘much more about myth than reality’ (Cartier 2005: 15).

Sheller notes that place-myths formed through myriad ‘[d]epictions of Caribbean “Edenism” [ . . . ] underwrite performances of touristic “hedonism” by naturalising the region’s landscape and its inhabitants as avatars of primitivism, luxuriant corruption, sensual stimulation, ease and availability’ (2004: 23). Such discursive manoeuvers implicate non-human nature in cultural activities while simultaneously ‘naturalizing’ natives, packaging them as objects within paradisal backdrops—a process that is bound up with western colonial assumptions about ‘primitive’ humans’ proximity to nature (Huggan and Tiffin 2007: 3). This holds some distinctly negative implications for postcolonial refashionings of islands as idyllic spaces: the dense repetition of paradisal tropes in brochure discourse, their connection to the construction of islands in western colonial history and thought, and the weighty interest that tourism corporations have in maintaining these placemyths make them extremely difficult to dislodge. Nonetheless, increasing environmental awareness coupled with marginalized peoples’ rising success in attaining global recognition suggest that postcolonial writers can play a role in destabilizing touristic place-myths’ more damaging characteristics and resisting exploitative tourism operations. To show this, I will address examples of how Kincaid and Walcott depict what Cartier terms ‘touristed landscapes’ in A Small Place (1988) and Omeros (1990) respectively.

Writing from a cultural geography perspective, Cartier uses the term ‘touristed landscapes’ to

represent an array of experiences and goals acted out by diverse people in locales that are subject to tourism but which are also places of historic and integral meaning, where ‘leisure/tourism’ [ . . . ] economies are also local economies, and where people are engaged in diverse aspects of everyday life.

(2005: 3)

The concentration of human activity in island borderzones means that many of their locations can, to varying extents, be interpreted as touristed landscapes. Crucially, as Charles Greer et al. point out, these landscapes encode— and can be read as producing—power relations which relate to the contested discursive meanings attributed to them (2008: 16). Noting that ‘[t]raditionally, geographical inquiries into landscape have [ . . . ] used the perspective of the outsider for understanding the meaning of landscape form and features’, Greer et al. emphasize the need to compare ‘insider and outsider’ perspectives in order to understand how landscapes are ‘far more laden with meaning than is outwardly visible’ (16–17). Like many of the readings in this book, Kincaid’s and Walcott’s portrayals of tourism not only offer such insights but blur the boundaries between insiders and outsiders due to the diasporic affiliations of their narrators and their multiple audiences. In doing this, both writers engage with the centrality of visual economies to tourism,¹ self-reflexively appropriating what Urry calls ‘[t]he typical tourist experience’: ‘see[ing] named scenes through a frame, such as the hotel window, the car windscreen or the window of the coach’ (2002: 90; original emphasis).

These perspectives form part of Urry’s influential sociological work on ‘the tourist gaze’, which identifies the factors that endow particular sites and sights with semiotic import for tourists. Although he avoids suggesting there is a ‘single tourist gaze’ or ‘universal experience that is true for all tourists at all times’ (1), Urry observes that tourism’s visual economies are ‘socially organised’ through the representations of particular places across various media (74). This involves a kind of ‘screening’ that places value on certain sites over others, and can ‘function to restrict or impair vision’ (Huggan 2001: 80). In this sense, sightseeing depends on the interrelationship between sensory perception (primarily visual) and the culturally interpellated structures of the imagination. One effect of such selective viewing is to reduce the complexity of lived environments to what Barry Curtis and Claire Pajaczkowska describe as ‘a surreal contingency which is almost dreamlike’ (1994: 206). This is constructed, they suggest, with the aim of preventing travellers from being consigned to ‘tourist hell’: sightseeing excursions ‘where meaning fails to congeal in specific sites and remains illegibly diffuse, or where the spaces between sites overwhelm the visitor with their insignificance’ (206). Such sentiments are, of course, problematic in their tendency to essentialize tourist motivations, especially as they fail to account for tourists who relish the unexpected or the contradictory (see Cartier 2005: 5). However, Curtis and Pajaczkowska’s observations correspond well with the kind of ‘dreamlike’, contingent environments promoted by the juxtaposition of attractions in holiday brochures. These suppress the continuous reality of island landscapes by editing out their less touristically pleasing components.

Curtis and Pajaczkowska’s argument is partly indebted to Michel de Certeau’s use of rhetorical tropes to characterize mobile perspectives on urban landscapes. In The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), de Certeau observes that ‘the “tropes” catalogued by rhetoric furnish models [ . . . ] for the analysis of ways of appropriating places’ (1984: 100). This underpins his reading of space and place via the tropes of synecdoche and asyndeton. In figurative terms, synecdoche involves the metaphorical substitution of a part for the whole (or vice versa), while asyndeton refers to the grammatical ‘suppression of linking words such as conjunctions and adverbs, either within a sentence or between sentences’ (101). Applying these tropes to forms of spatial perception, de Certeau states that:

Synecdoche makes more dense: it amplifies the detail and miniaturizes the whole. Asyndeton cuts out: it undoes continuity and undercuts its plausibility. A space treated in this way and shaped by practices is transformed into enlarged singularities and separate islands.

(101)

These ideas have significant implications for interpreting literary depictions of touristed island landscapes as they provide a way of analyzing how writers work with and counter the fragmentary and often distorted perspectives described by de Certeau. The following textual readings show how Kincaid and Walcott recontextualize landscape ‘singularities’ in their respective depictions of ‘framed’ scenes, looking first at how island landscapes are seen from taxi windows, then contrasting this with stationary views through hotel windows and camera lenses.

Touristed Landscapes on the Move

A Small Place has occasioned abundant controversy since its publication. Much of this centres on the nature of the narrative voice and its relation to Kincaid herself, particularly as she wrote this short but excoriating polemic after a visit to Antigua following two decades’ absence. Dianne Simmons reports that ‘[t]he essay was judged too “angry” for the New Yorker’ (1994: 136), which had previously published several of Kincaid’s short stories, and it continues to draw similar reactions from critics who otherwise deal sensitively with the text’s complexities and seeming contradictions. For instance, Jane King concludes an article by stating that ‘it is anger and insult and little else which Kincaid offers her native Caribbean’ (2002: 907), comparing Kincaid’s seemingly despairing vision to that of V.S. Naipaul. By contrast, my analysis of this jeremiad, which presents one of the most definitive indictments of mass tourism’s neocolonial complicities, emphasizes its ironically evasive characteristics and its strategic deployment of invective to relativize, rather than simply reject, the bases of touristic practice.

A Small Place opens by describing the arrival in Antigua of a tourist who shares numerous potential affinities with metropolitan readers. The first paragraph, which begins: ‘If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what you will see’ (1988: 3) and details this second person’s imagined impressions of the island from the window of a taxi, includes five instances of the verb ‘to see’. This activates a visual economy that presumes a largely western or Eurocentric tourist gaze. Landing at the ‘V.C. Bird International Airport’, the narrator suggests that you might ‘wonder why a Prime Minister would want an airport named after him’ and not a school, hospital or public monument (3). You can only wonder this, the narrator proceeds, because ‘you have not yet seen a school in Antigua, you have not yet seen the hospital in Antigua, you have not yet seen a public monument in Antigua’ (3). The rhetorical repetition of ‘seen’ in this (asyndetic) sentence implies a strong sensitivity not only to its ocular connotations but also to what is ‘seen’ in the imagination, how ‘seeing’ implies apprehension or understanding, and the process of learning by reading (OED 4.c.). Kincaid draws on all these senses in describing features of the Antiguan landscape that both attract and fail to attract tourists’ attention on the way to the hotel in A Small Place’s opening pages.

Emerging from the airport feeling ‘cleansed [ . . . ] blessed [ . . . ] free’ (5), Kincaid’s tourist-reader boards the taxi and spends most of the journey ‘looking out the window (because you want to get your money’s worth)’ (6). The narrator then ironically suggests that, while the tourist attempts to get maximum value from consuming the journey’s moving landscape, the banality of touristic observation prevents him or her from reading its semiotic markers correctly. For instance, the dilapidated state of the local school and hospital fails to incite interest, much less outrage or fear (in case ‘a blood vessel in your neck should break’ [8]). Neither does ‘the sight of [ . . . ] brand-new cars driven by people who may or may not have really passed their driving test [ . . . ] stir up these thoughts in you’ (7). Instead, the tourist is soon ‘tired of all this looking’, and languorously begins to anticipate arrival at the hotel. The only time when the landscape resolves legibly is when the syndetic flux is momentarily arrested (or, like a photograph, clipped), and the tourist is able to appreciate the ‘splendid view of St. John’s harbour’ commanded by the American Embassy (10), which is misread as signifying the ‘big favour’ his or her ‘powerful country’ granted Antigua through colonization (10–11). While Kincaid presents a rapidly changing set of landscape singularities, the meanings condensed within them are not apparent to visitors who do not see them properly. As a result, the richly connotative, socio-political landscape bisected by the taxi is rendered illegible to an imagination saturated with tropical island place-myths.

There is, however, a further irony which shows Kincaid to be deeply attentive to contrasting touristic imaginations and motivations. That is, if ‘you’, the tourist-reader, do not dreamily misread the historicized elements of this touristed environment, you are permitted to align yourself with Kincaid’s narrator and sidestep the trajectory of her polemic. Kincaid presents a very subtle, continually shifting portrayal of tourist behaviour—self-reflexively accentuated by the fact that she is also a tourist in her homeland—which acts as an index of neocolonial complicity while simultaneously allowing individual readers (who may also be tourists) to differentiate themselves from such archetypes. Her use of the second person ‘you’ implicates the reader as a tourist who is either European or North American, who is, ‘to be frank, white’ (4), and who lives in a ‘large and modern and prosperous city’ (15). Yet, as Moira Ferguson notes, the conditional term ‘if’ in the opening sentence ‘carries a weighty suggestion’: the tourists Kincaid directs her invective towards, Ferguson argues, are those who epitomize ‘human callousness, no better than the slave owners of old’ (1994: 81). Kincaid’s conditional language is supported by a subtle differentiation of tourist types in her opening: ‘You may be the sort of tourist who would wonder why a Prime Minister would want an airport named after him’ (1988: 3; my emphasis). Beginning by using the indefinite article to describe her tourist-reader, Kincaid alternates between definite and indefinite articles four further times in the text’s first paragraph. ‘You are a tourist’ she asserts, but her shifting article use alongside her employment of conditional terms undercuts essentialized homogenizations of touristic identity. This also partly destabilizes the syllogistic logic of the text’s proceeding arguments. In maintaining a gap between the touristic phenomena she roundly criticizes and the cognitive perspectives of its individual practitioners, Kin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Tourism and Nature
• Part II: Tourism and Culture
• Part III: Sex, Tourism, and Embodied Experience
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography