Demobilizing and remobilizing Caribbean paradise

Abstract

The Caribbean island thus became one of the first ‘global icons’ (Franklin et al. 2000) to encapsulate the dreams and contexts of modernity. In an endless simulacrum, earlier literary and visual representations of the ‘Paradise Isles’ have been mapped into the collective tourist unconscious before they have ever set foot there. The real Caribbean is always a performance of the vivid Caribbean of the imagination. Verdant forests, exotic flora, and tropical greenery serve as powerful symbols of the ‘Eden’ that is imagined before European (and African) intrusion into the New World. Tobago, for example, is today promoted as a place where you can ‘see the islands as Columbus first saw them’, while Dominica is described as ‘still the primitive garden that Columbus first sighted in 1493, an area of tropical rainforests, flowers of incredible beauty and animals that exist nowhere else in the world’ (Noble Caledonian 2002). The Caribbean has been renaturalized as a virgin paradise in ways that continue to inform its contemporary desirability as the ultimate ‘place to play’ (Sheller 2003a, 2004). It is brought to the consumer in texts, images, and signs, and is fantastically consumed by tourists who draw on existing visual and sensuous performances to make certain kinds of movements in and through the Caribbean viable. As Strachan argues, the ‘touristconsumer appears to buy paradise in the travel agency or airline ticket office or over the phone, but, actually, this prospective traveler has purchased only the promise of “paradise”: the collection of ideas, the myth, the electronic or printed messages that has been exported to her’ (Strachan 2002: 113).

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