Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture by Angelique Nixon

Abstract

Reviewed by: Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture by Angelique Nixon Nilak Datta (bio) Nixon, Angelique. Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2015. A short while ago, I was traveling to New Delhi from Goa. I had received Angelique Nixon’s Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture in the mail. As I was reading it on my return flight to Goa, where I live and work, I found myself seated next to a couple who were en route to India’s “beach paradise” for a short getaway. The monsoon was in full swing and Goa, the one state in the Indian union that relies almost exclusively on tourism for its state revenue, was in the “off-season” mode. Beaches are not the fun-filled spaces they are for most part of the year and the party scene is not too fetching. Goa makes do with monsoon trekking, a less economically profitable (but more eco-friendly) substitute for mainstream beach tourism. When I informed the couple what they were in for, they were unhappy. The husband, an investment banker, exhibited signs of anger and disappointment. The wife tried to console him. They had booked resort rooms (at throwaway prices) with the high hope of living it up and enjoying paradise, far away from the hurry of metropolitan life. The prospect of having to make do with monsoon trekking seemed a let-down. It would have been—and it was—difficult to let them know that Goa had a unique history of colonialism, having been sort of a Portuguese enclave surrounded by large British dominions. In that sense, Goa has a unique heritage of being a Portuguese enclave while the vast Indo-Pakistan subcontinent was under British occupation. I ventured to suggest they might enjoy the culture and the cuisine instead of being encased in a tourist bubble. The conversation did not go too well. Angelique Nixon deals with a similar phenomenon: the touristic construction of the Caribbean as “paradise” and its roots in the nexus between colonialism and slavery. The [End Page 942] colonial (white, male) gaze constructed the region as “Paradise”; the illusion continues to be sustained by the North American and Anglo European globalized tourist circuit through cruise ship tourism, sex tourism, tourist brochure rhetoric, the neocolonial Bahamian school education system, the neo-imperial travel genre, diaspora tourism, and heritage tourism. The book offers two arguments. First, if colonialism and slavery fashioned a way of looking at the Caribbean and its peoples as a consumable paradise filled with sun, sand, and desirable black bodies, the neocolonial governments in association with foreign investment banks and multinational corporations have sustained the image through different forms of tourism. Writers, artists, and intellectuals have been (since the 1950s) resisting this construction, the colonization of locals’ minds, and the way locals are forced to see themselves. Second, contemporary writers like Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, Marion Bethel, Michelle Cliff, Oonya Kamala Kempadoo, Christian Campbell, and artist-activists like Arlene Nash-Ferguson, Dionne Benjamin-Smith, Erna Brodber, and Esther Figueroa expose the connections between colonialism and neocolonialism through their artistic work and question the dominant representations of paradise by showing the exploitative consumption of the Caribbean. These are the book’s chief arguments. As such, when one approaches the diverse materials in the book, one might easily misunderstand Nixon’s Resisting Paradise as performing a familiar cultural studies maneuver that is loosely based on Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s famed culture industry thesis. So, a hasty reading of the book produces the impression that Nixon represents the packaging of peoples, places, and cultures through commercialization of the Caribbean and against which, artists and intellectuals have been fighting—and continue to fight—a near-losing battle with global capitalism to salvage something authentic and worth preserving. However, a careful reading reveals that Nixon accomplishes two important objectives in this book. First, she analyzes the social and economic processes by which the Caribbean has been constituted as paradise. Second, and more importantly, she shows how the international tourist expectations reinforce established patterns of heteronormativity and class privilege during visits to...