“I guess that’s another place they’ve ruined for us”: A spatial struggle against the development of commercial tourism in Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place and Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven

Abstract

This article discusses Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, a work of creative non-fiction, and Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven, a semi-autobiographical novel, as texts which offer a peripheral perspective of global modernity – one informed by the poverty, oppression and colonial history underwriting the development of commercial tourism in the Caribbean-to the dominant narrative produced by the tourism industry. It argues that this perspectival conflict emerges from, and feeds into, what Henri Lefebvre notes is a struggle for (and against) the transformation of the “concrete” space of everyday lived experience into an “abstract space”, a homogenous, commodified, and ahistorical space produced to facilitate the accumulation of wealth. By pointing to overlapping and discrepant spatial practices, this article contends that Kincaid and Cliff disrupt the tourism industry’s construction of Antigua and Jamaica as locations isolated from historical and social processes.