Resisting Paradise

Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture

Angelique V. Nixon

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781626745995
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

Winner of the Caribbean Studies Association's 2016 Barbara T. Christian Award for Best Book in the Humanities Tourists flock to the Caribbean for its beaches and spread more than just blankets and dollars. Indeed, tourism has overly affected the culture there. Resisting Paradise explores the import of both tourism and diaspora in shaping Caribbean identity. It examines Caribbean writers and others who confront the region's overdependence on the tourist industry and the many ways that tourism continues the legacy of colonialism. Angelique V. Nixon interrogates the relationship between culture and sex within the production of "paradise" and investigates the ways in which Caribbean writers, artists, and activists respond to and powerfully resist this production. Forms of resistance include critiquing exploitation, challenging dominant historical narratives, exposing tourism's influence on cultural and sexual identity in the Caribbean and its diaspora, and offering alternative models of tourism and travel. Resisting Paradise places emphasis on the Caribbean people and its diasporic subjects as travelers and as cultural workers contributing to alternate and defiant understandings of tourism in the region. Through a unique multidisciplinary approach to comparative literary analysis, interviews, and participant observation, Nixon analyzes the ways Caribbean cultural producers are taking control of representation. While focused mainly on the Anglophone Caribbean, the study covers a range of territories including Antigua, the Bahamas, Grenada, Haiti, Jamaica, as well as Trinidad and Tobago, to deliver a potent critique.

CHAPTER ONE

Resisting Paradise—An Introduction

The metaphor and mythology of paradise continues to powerfully determine representations of the Caribbean as a region and space within popular culture and the global tourist industry. Discourses of paradise are inherently racialized, gendered, and sexualized because of and through the histories of slavery and colonialism. This may be obvious to some, but it is important to remember that the use of paradise is neither ambivalent nor static even when it fixes the region outside time and space; paradise is always on some level signifying colonial, sexualized, racialized, and gendered space/object/desire. As Ian Strachan reminds us in Paradise and Plantation: “The strength of paradise as metaphor and mythological construct lies in its ability to transform itself” (36). In both imagined and real ways, “paradise” signifies “Caribbean,” and as a result, the region is deeply invested in and affected by the production of paradise, which is most powerfully inscribed within and created by the Caribbean tourist industry. Therefore, it is through critiques of tourism that we find the most powerful confrontations to the myth and metaphor of paradise, particularly in the work of Caribbean cultural producers who insist upon resisting these notions of paradise and complicate understandings of tourism and travel in relation to diaspora and subjectivity, to sexual and cultural identity, to sense of self. Moreover, as Caribbean diaspora communities all over the world maintain connections to home and cultural identity through travel and return, it becomes more and more important to engage in the relationship among tourism, diaspora, and identity.

In the postindependence period, the Caribbean remains deeply affected, materially and culturally, by colonial exploitation, which manifests itself in many forms: foreign investment, globalization, transnational corporations, tourism, and cultural production, among others. As the most dominant industry in the region, tourism is one of the largest sites of neocolonialism, shaping economic realities and national culture. Hence, there exists a strong discord between the tourist industry and national governments who invest in tourism and Caribbean producers of culture (writers and artists) who negotiate with the region’s overdependence on tourism. Due to the extraordinary power of tourism, a broad spectrum of contemporary Caribbean writers and artists have addressed Caribbean tourism in their work. These artists and writers contend with the fact that tourism’s position as the leading industry across the region is unlikely to change, and they grapple with the continued exploitation of colonialism found in the industry.¹ Their writing on travel and tourism in the Caribbean constitutes a critical contestation of neocolonialism, paralleling in scope and significance the foundational work of Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and George Lamming’s Pleasures of Exile. As their counterparts in the 1950s, this new generation of writers is international, includes Afro-Caribbean Americans, and sees its literature as part of a material and political struggle for change.

This book asserts the importance of both tourism and diaspora in shaping Caribbean identity through an examination of cultural productions and activism by several writers and artists inside and outside the region. These writers and artists contend with the region’s overdependence on the tourist industry and address the many ways that tourism continues the legacy of colonialism. I argue that their critiques of tourism are grounded in a resistance to paradise: defined as exposing the lie and burden of creating and sustaining notions of paradise for tourism and the extent to which this drastically affects people, culture, and identity across the region. Resisting Paradise investigates the ways in which Caribbean writers, artists, and other cultural workers respond and powerfully resist this production. They do so in various ways, but there are two major elements to this resistance: (1) the creation of alternative models of tourism that are less exploitative and rooted in African diasporic identity and cultural practices; and (2) the representation of exploitative tourism and consumption (in terms of economy, politics, culture, and sex). These elements of resistance offer not only engaged critiques of tourism, but also insights into the depths of tourism’s influence on cultural and sexual identity across the region and in Caribbean diasporic communities.

They also position tourism as a form of neocolonialism (i.e., the economic, political, and social relations of power that keep postcolonial countries and the Global South bound to the Global North); and this reflects the dominant view of scholars, such as M. Jacqui Alexander, Frantz Fanon, Cynthia Enloe, Polly Pattullo, Mimi Sheller, Ian Strachan, Clive Thomas, and Krista Thompson, among others. This project is firmly grounded in the established view within colonial and postcolonial criticism since Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth that tourism embodies the stagnation of decolonization and the external dependency of postcolonial societies.² A number of Caribbean cultural producers illustrate what scholars (across disciplines, including economics, history, and sociology) have also argued—that the histories of slavery and colonialism are intimately bound to economies, movement, and representation in the neocolonial present. The location and mobility of Caribbean writers and artists shape their engagement; nevertheless, they launch similar criticisms by rewriting history and travel discourses written from the perspective of the colonized, gendered, sexualized, and racialized subject.

Consequently, Resisting Paradise examines cultural producers who are directly engaged in multifaceted critiques of tourism that expose and resist exploitative consumption. Some of the writers are located in the region, such as Marion Bethel, Erna Brodber, and Oonya Kempadoo. They also live abroad, like Christian Campbell, Michelle Cliff, Edwidge Danticat, and Jamaica Kincaid, and include second-generation Caribbean American writers; namely, Audre Lorde and Paule Marshall. These writers represent migratory flows, transnational movements, and consumption by not only typical tourists, but also different kinds of tourists (meaning, Caribbean emigrants, Caribbeans born abroad, African Americans, and fellow Caribbeans). These literary works are conceptualized in this study as migratory artifacts and the result of the migratory and diaspora experience; these migratory artifacts illustrate the extent to which the Caribbean is so deeply affected by mobility, tourism, and diaspora. Hence, the subject position and location of these writers matter as well in terms of how they navigate identity and space. Additionally, in order to engage a spectrum of Caribbean cultural texts, I also discuss the work of other cultural workers in the region: Bahamian educator Arlene Nash Ferguson, who works within the tourist industry to develop a more ethical model using culture; Jamaican filmmaker Esther Figueroa and her critique of unsustainable tourism development through an environmental and working-class lens; Bahamian visual artist Dionne Benjamin-Smith in her digital media work that exposes overdependence on foreign investment through tourism development; and The Current art team at Baha Mar Resort and the work of Bahamian visual artist John Cox to develop a new model of art and culture tourism. These are very different approaches to tourism yet they both speak to the kinds of negotiations Caribbean people make within a tourist economy.

The aim in this project is to reveal how writers and artists, among other cultural workers, located inside and outside the region are changing and transforming the way we think of tourism and neocolonialism. I investigate literary works, visual arts, and activism, along with perspectives from workers in the tourist industry and an analysis of specific festivals, sites, and culture produced for tourism. More specifically, I focus on Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora subjects as travelers and as cultural workers contributing to alternative and resistant understandings of tourism in the Caribbean. Through a multidisciplinary approach and comparative praxis, I explore the ways Caribbean cultural producers are taking control of representation and sustaining subjectivity. And I offer various sites of knowing or knowledge production through literary and cultural analysis, interviews, auto-ethnography, and participant observation in humanities-based field research. The focus is mainly on the Anglophone Caribbean, but my study also covers a range of geographical territories including Antigua, the Bahamas, Grenada, Haiti, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago. Overall, the book utilizes a transnational feminist post-colonial framework in order to theorize “resisting paradise” and the sexual-cultural politics of tourism, particularly as they intersect with diaspora and sexuality.

Resisting Paradise complicates the ways in which diaspora studies have addressed issues of mobility and migration by examining the extent to which tourism affects the culture, identity, sexuality, and movement of diasporic peoples. By exploring connections between local and transnational writers of Caribbean heritage who engage with tourism and travel, this study troubles the divides among African American and Caribbean literatures through a specific focus on black female writers who defy boundaries of nation, genre, and identity. These writers challenge dominant social constructions and representations by reworking the travel genre and placing themselves and their characters into a white, male-dominated space. Historically, travel writing has been dominated by white men and has greatly contributed to discourses of paradise, history, and social science; namely, the construction of “the other” (as primitive, native, sexual, feminine, and so on) in opposition to the white European colonizer. These ideas are sustained and embedded in tourism discourses; therefore, reworking the travel genre through a critique of tourism is an important move in resisting paradise and the racialized and oversexualized representations of the Caribbean and its people.

The emerging study of the relationship between tourism and diaspora studies has been explored in the collection Tourism, Diasporas and Space edited by Tim Coles and Dallen J. Timothy. Coles and Timothy assert that tourism studies have not (until recently) effectively taken into consideration diaspora communities, while diaspora studies have not fully dealt with the implications of tourism for diaspora (xi–xii). Their intention is “to concentrate on the relationship between the diasporic condition and the production and consumption of tourism for diasporas themselves rather than diasporas as exotic Others to be gazed upon” (Coles and Timothy 1). This is an insightful move for tourism studies—understanding the complexities of diaspora communities and those who have mobility and can travel and/or return home because tourism can both mobilize and immobilize. Scholar Jenny Burman takes up a related issue in her book Transnational Yearnings in which she traces the movements of Jamaican Canadians between postcolonial Jamaica and Toronto as a way to investigate both migration and leisure travel. Her focus is on the creation of the urban city and Caribbean diaspora through these movements. She offers compelling insights into the complicated relationships between Caribbean spaces and mobility through travel and return. My contribution expands these conversations by focusing on the Caribbean as a space for African diaspora and Caribbean diaspora tourism; furthermore, I “reverse the gaze” to consider how Caribbean people across the region and diaspora negotiate touristic production and consumption, and how diaspora then impacts tourism.³

The Caribbean is a unique location for the study of the relations between tourism and diaspora because both tourism and diaspora have indelibly shaped the region. However, this region has diaspora communities that are sometimes as large or nearly as large as the home country, with communities in the United States, Canada, England, and Central and South America, often called the Caribbean diaspora.⁴ These Caribbean communities outside the region have been a vital part of Caribbean social and intellectual histories, identity formation, politics, and economics. Moreover, when Caribbeans abroad and their children travel back home for visits, these returning subjects constitute an important part of the tourist market—they are participating in tourism as “different” kinds of tourists. But what does it mean to be a tourist and contribute to tourism in the Caribbean? Can someone travel to the Caribbean and not participate in the business of tourism? The tourist industry and tourist have a different significance in the Caribbean than they do in North American and European contexts because of the region’s dependence on tourism. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the definition of “tourist” is someone who “travels for pleasure or culture” and “one who makes a tour or tours” (OED “tourist”). Implicit in this definition is the possession of the money necessary to travel and to travel for the purpose of leisure; hence, tourists can be defined as having mobility and privilege. But what about people who travel for business purposes, to study, or return home to visit family and friends (to name only a few other forms of travel)? Similar to those who travel for pleasure, business and student travelers, along with returning subjects, have mobility and privilege (relatively speaking). Furthermore, in one way or another, they all participate in the industry that facilitates tourism, especially within Caribbean economies that are overly dependent upon tourism. The Oxford English Dictionary defines tourism as “the theory and practice of touring,” “traveling for pleasure,” “the business of attracting tourists,” and “providing for their accommodation and entertainment” (OED “tourism”). Many countries in the region are dominated by tourism, which consequently structures much of the national economy and infrastructure. As a result, tourism directly facilitates movement in and out of places of interest as well as accommodations and transport in these places. This means that the business of tourism includes the operation of airlines, airports, hotels, tour companies, taxis, attractions, restaurants, marketplaces, and much more. Therefore, when traveling to places that are popular tourist destinations, whether one visits for pleasure, culture, learning, business, or visiting family, all participate in the tourist industry as “tourists” in one way or another. The label of “tourist” certainly has its share of negative connotations, and those who return home or travel for business or education may reject this designation. Nevertheless, if one travels, one is implicated in the forces of the tourist industry, particularly in the Caribbean.

Negotiating “tourism” as a Caribbean person who lives abroad and travels to the region can be a difficult process. This project is not merely an object of study for me, but rather it is a reflection and deep examination of my own experience as a migrant Caribbean person who returns to the region for a multitude of reasons. Hence, I acknowledge my own subject position as a black mixed-race Caribbean queer woman from poor and working-class roots, born and raised in Nassau, the Bahamas, who lives abroad, has traveled extensively, and loves to travel. I migrated to the United States in my early twenties to pursue higher education and work opportunities, yet I remain closely tied to my homespace (and the Caribbean region as a whole) even though I have lived abroad for many years. Before my career in academia, I spent years working in the tourism and banking industries; hence, I have experienced first hand the double bind of a tourist economy, which afforded me the mobility to migrate and pursue higher education. This directly impacts my scholarly and creative work, and most importantly how I travel and engage with the business of tourism. I locate myself in the tradition and legacy of women of color feminist, womanist, and postcolonial writers and scholars who value and assert our right to theorize and analyze our own experience, to rewrite histories/herstories, and assert our subjectivities. Therefore, my subject position remains integral to this project of critiquing tourism and theorizing resistance. Furthermore, as someone who travels across the Caribbean and who also travels around the world for work, research, and pleasure, I am deeply invested in searching for ways to be a more ethical and responsible traveler, and at the same time acknowledge my subject position of return and diasporic experience. The writers, activists, artists, and intellectuals included in this study also traverse the boundaries of tourist, returning Caribbean subject, traveler, and diaspora, among others. At times, the critiques and uncovering of exploitative consumption through tourism will seem overwhelming and daunting, but these may force us to rethink our relations with one another and with space and place. Thus, we will consider the unique position of the Caribbean in these conversations and debates about tourism, exploitation, mobility, diaspora, and sexuality.

The project is in conversation with two important works that engage with tourism, mobility, and consumption in the Caribbean context: Mimi Sheller’s Consuming the Caribbean and Ian Strachan’s Paradise and Plantation. Sheller argues that the region has significantly contributed to the construction of Western modernity and counters the dominant view that the Caribbean has been peripheral to modernity and to the West. She asserts that the accumulation of wealth and power by the West, the development of world systems of trade, production, and consumption have been predicated on an unequal access to mobility, which has created an “underdeveloped” Caribbean. This underdeveloped Caribbean is sustained through not only neocolonialism and global capitalism, but also through representation. While Sheller’s object is to analyze the “invention” of the “idea of the Caribbean” in Euro-American culture, my goal is to investigate what this “invention” of the Caribbean has meant in Caribbean culture. Although Sheller acknowledges the powerful flows of culture, migrants, tourists, and transnationals that affect representations of the Caribbean, her focus is on North America and Europe. She writes to an audience that is middle- to upper-class European and American because she believes these readers should know that they benefit from the unethical and historical consumption of the Caribbean (through trade, material goods, tourism, etc.). Resisting Paradise complicates Sheller’s project by interrogating the work of Caribbean cultural producers who engage with the contemporary politics of consumption by addressing tourism and its effects on Caribbean cultural and sexual identity.

In contrast to Sheller, who addresses a wide spectrum of consumption patterns, Ian Strachan focuses exclusively on tourism as a form of colonial legacy, and similar to Sheller, traces it back to Europe’s conquest of the Caribbean. He asserts that there exists an inextricable relationship between paradise and plantation because the economic and political dependency established during slavery and colonialism has been reproduced in the tourist industry; and this depends heavily (much as the plantation economy did) on foreign investments, foreign ownership, governmental policy, monoculture economy, and imported commodities. Both Sheller and Strachan establish that the material elements of tourism are directly descended from the plantation and slavery, and as Strachan examines specifically, so is the literature of tourism (what he describes as brochure discourse). In other words, there is a continuum (marked by important distinctions) between the travel literature of the colonial era, prior to the development of tourism in the twentieth century, and the literature developed for the industry. Strachan’s focus is on the history of paradise and plantation metaphors, how they operate in tourism’s brochure discourse, and how prominent Caribbean writers have responded to this dichotomy. Resisting Paradise extends Strachan’s discussion of postcolonial Caribbean writers’ responses to “paradise” by focusing on explicit engagements and critiques of tourism found in Caribbean cultural production. I analyze how Caribbean writers, artists, and cultural workers resist what Strachan calls the “myth-reality” that tourism produces through its selling of Caribbean paradise. This project situates and theorizes “resisting paradise” as not only a continuation of anticolonial struggle but forging new possibilities of resistance against neocolonialism.

In 1960, Frantz Fanon explained why resistance to colonialism was evident, but he also warned that the exploitative relations of colonialism would be reproduced after the fight for independence:

This European opulence is literally scandalous, for it has been founded on slavery, it has been nourished with the blood of slaves and it comes directly from the soil and from the subsoil of that underdeveloped world. The well-being and the progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians, and the yellow races. We have decided not to overlook this any longer. (97)

This “curse of independence” would leave newly independent countries economically dependent upon Europe through capital (acquired from the colonies and built on the labor of its people) and “immense resources of coercion” (97). As Fanon predicted, the ruling middle class or national bourgeoisie would maintain the colonial structures that served them during colonial rule. Through the process of nationalization, the middle class o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One Resisting Paradise—An Introduction
• Chapter Two Caribbean Migrant Writers and the Politics of Return
• Chapter Three Black Female Travel: Diasporic Connections and Revolutionary Desire
• Chapter Four Living and Imagining in Paradise: The Culture of a Tourist Economy
• Chapter Five Negotiating Tropical Desires in Social and Physical Landscapes
• Chapter Six Vexed Relations: The Interplay of Culture, Race, and Sex
• Chapter Seven Rethinking Sites of Caribbean Rebellion and Freedom
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index