Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture

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 operates as intermediary between their governments and foreign companies (often from former colonies): seen through its [intermediary] eyes, its mission has nothing to do with transforming the nation; it consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line between nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged, which today puts on the mask of neo-colonialism (152). If we reflect on the hardships of postcolonial countries, the many countries that remain colonized, new forms of empire, and controls through global capitalism, Fanon’s theories clearly resonate and continue to provide a framework for understanding how neocolonialism works. Insightfully, Fanon further predicts that the national bourgeoisies being swayed by the desire for indulgence experienced in the West would create centers of rest and relaxation and pleasure resorts to meet the wishes of the Western bourgeoisies. Such activity is given the name tourism, and for the occasion will be built up as a nation industry (153). While Fanon’s focus was on the continent of Africa, this activity is also evident and in full operation in the Caribbean region. As a global industry, tourism is the major national industry in the Caribbean, even in countries that promote other industries, as well as in countries that remain colonized. Fanon views tourism as an extension of colonial rule and a reflection of a national consciousness that fails to achieve true liberation or complete decolonization. Hence, this is why I describe tourism as a neocolonial enterprise.

In The Poor and the Powerless, Clive Thomas studies economic policy and change in the Caribbean from colonial rule to the mid-1980s, and he also makes the connection between tourism and neocolonialism. He explains that the service sector, including tourism and offshore banking, was promoted by many islands in the region (after World War II) as a way to help local economies with employment and foreign exchange (144). But as Thomas asserts, the tourist industry also facilitates an outflow or leakage of foreign exchange and the adoption of foreign-oriented polices by Caribbean governments (pre- and postindependence), who support investment from major transnational corporations (TNCs) for infrastructural developments, hotels, tour companies, and airlines (160). Thomas traces the development of tourism in the region from 1970 to the mid-1980s, and he criticizes the economic inefficiency of the tourist industry and negative sociopolitical factors, such as dependence on colonial relationships, concentration on the United States market, which has led to the region being vulnerable to US foreign policies; environmental dangers; negative racial stereotypes (of tourists and locals); sex tourism; and promotion of local culture for tourism (what Thomas calls Caribbean exotica) (164–66). Economic and sociopolitical concerns about the tourist industry in the Caribbean fuel Thomas’s final critique of tourism and the divide it promotes between the local and the tourist:

Plush tourist facilities coexist with depressed rural areas, unemployment, poverty and urban slums. The contrast is a reminder that enclave tourism is mutually negative—negative in terms of its local impact and negative for tourists themselves. The result is that the development of the industry, at huge financial and social cost, has in the long run contributed little towards the permanent eradication of the widespread poverty and powerlessness of the West Indian people. (167)

Facilities for tourism are often in enclaves, gated off and separated from local communities (particularly on coastlines across the region), and this has increased from the mid-1980s to now (2015) with more and more hotel resorts where tourists rarely (if ever) have to leave the property (especially at the all-inclusive resorts). As Thomas asserts in a mid-1980s moment, the tourist industry has not helped to build long-term, sustainable development in the region, but rather as other critics of tourism argue, its costs outweigh its benefits. Furthermore, Thomas identifies foreign ownership and control of resources, particularly evident in the tourist industry across the region as having negatively affected long-term economic growth. Tom Barry, Beth Wood, and Deb Preusch, in The Other Side of Paradise, also examine the profound impact that foreign investment in the Caribbean has had on the politics and economies in the region. They provide an extensive overview of the international corporate investment during the 1970s and 1980s by showing how transnational corporations (TNCs) have infiltrated almost every sector of the Caribbean economy, particularly tourism.⁵

While some of these issues have changed and positive and more sustainable growth has occurred in different sectors since the 1980s, much of these concerns are still current today. Regional organizations such as CARICOM (Caribbean Community) and the Association of Caribbean States (ACS) strive for regional integration, and even as they explore different sectors for economic growth, tourism continues to be the primary focus. Hence, what economists call dependency capitalism thrives in the region, and the tourist industry supports this model. Polly Pattullo’s tourism study Last Resorts interrogates and criticizes the mid-1990s focus on tourism as the most important and only means of economic survival for the Caribbean region by its governments and leaders. Overall, she examines the effects of tourism on Caribbean culture, environment, and social relations. Her analysis of the foreign-owned, multinational hotels, and their relationships to the airline industry and tour companies demonstrate the complexity involved in this pattern of external dependency (25). She argues that linkages among Caribbean countries must be forged in order to prevent leakages, which occurs when money brought in through tourism is spent on importing goods/services for the tourist industry, with an average of every seventy cents to the dollar being spent outside the region (38). Barry, Wood, and Preusch’s discussion of tourism reads like a prequel to Pattullo’s Last Resorts, in which they show that transnational corporations and foreign investors control and reap most of the profits from the tourist industry. Both of these studies assert that tour operators make profits through vacation packages, which include hotel, airfare, car rental, meals, and entertainment that are paid by tourists before they even land in the region. Studies from the 1980s and 1990s reveal the extent to which the costs of tourism ultimately outweigh the benefits, and this has continued. Nevertheless, the tourist industry maintains incredible power throughout the region, with state-sanctioned ministries/boards of tourism and regional organizations that uphold tourism as the savior and gateway to progress and development in spite of evidence to the contrary. Certainly, in the past ten to fifteen years, some countries in the region have done better than others; however, overdependence on tourism remains a major problem and reflects the extent to which decolonization in both economic and cultural terms has not been fully realized across the region, particularly in postcolonial Caribbean states.⁶

A number of postindependence studies have emphasized that the Caribbean continues to be effectively colonized through neocolonial economic relations, but they also explain these neocolonial relations are reinforced through cultural colonization. Paget Henry and Carl Stone’s edited collection The New Caribbean includes several essays that posit the process of decolonization not leading to more economic, political, or cultural control.⁷ More specifically, Trevor Farrell argues that the English-speaking Caribbean remains essentially colonized and what has changed is the form, mechanisms, and agents of colonization (5). He asserts that dynamic changes are and will continue occurring in the region, but decolonization remains a myth that is bound up in international relations, American global power, capitalisms, and political and economic developments. By measuring contemporary Caribbean reality with that of the colonial condition, Farrell explains that the Caribbean has little control over its own resources, movement, and development (6–7).⁸ He asserts that the economy of the Caribbean is deeply and extensively controlled by transnational corporations even though it appears as if localization has occurred (examples include Jamaica’s bauxite industry, Trinidad and Tobago’s oil industry, and the entire region’s agricultural sector). This resonates with the studies done in The Other Side of Paradise, The Poor and the Powerless, and Last Resorts (among others). Farrell is also concerned with the extensive cultural and psychological colonization that he argues still marks the postindependence Caribbean (11). Similarly, Paget Henry argues that we must consider the distorted consciousness of colonized people and places because just as colonization uproots economic and political institutions, it also disrupts cultural institutions. Utilizing Fanon’s theories of colonization, Henry explains that the colonizer’s social definition of the colonized distorts the colonized consciousness. Therefore, in order for any real or comprehensive decolonization to take place, Henry posits that cultural institutions must also be decolonized. While focusing on the cultural institutions of the Anglophone Caribbean, he argues against the divide between cultural and structural explanations of underdevelopment because culture and societal structures (political and economic) are inextricably connected and therefore affected by colonialism in what he calls the neocolonial period. Thus, he sees no real decolonization occurring in the region because of the disruption of decolonization and the onset of neocolonialism through structural imbalances, foreign control, and cultural dependency. Although Henry does not reference tourism as a part of neocolonialism, all of the structures implicated are directly fueled by the tourist industry.

It remains very difficult and at times impossible to criticize tourism (especially in local spaces) given that it is the major source of employment and income for so many people across the region. Moreover, countries that are submerged in IMF and World Bank debt rely on tourism and the foreign investments and capital that it brings. Hence, the double bind of a tourist economy, which then rarely facilitates studies that search for economic sustainability over ethical or cultural concerns. However, two new studies of Caribbean tourism attempt to focus on the sociopolitical, cultural, and economic realities as they explore tourism—Caribbean Tourism: More than Sun, Sand, and Sea (2007) and New Perspectives on Caribbean Tourism (2008). But these studies do not address any forms of resistance and cultural representations that expose and work to change the neocolonial dynamics of tourism.

Tourism is one of the most powerful conduits of neocolonial exploitation because the industry not only thrives on foreign investment, thereby affecting economic and political structures, but it also drastically shapes the sociocultural landscape of the region. This reflects what many Caribbean scholars, artists, writers, and intellectuals have described as continued cultural colonization or the lingering effects of slavery and colonialism on Caribbean identity. More specifically, tourism reproduces the destructive psychology and race and