Travelling Humour Reimagined: The Comedic Unhinging of the European Gaze in Caribbean Postcards

Abstract

If you go to Antigua as a tourist . . . you might say, What a beautiful island Antigua is - more beautiful than any of the other islands you have seen, ... their way, but they were much green, . . . which indicated to you, the tourist, that they got quite a bit of rainfall, and rain is the very thing that you, just now, do not want, for you are thinking of the hard and cold and dark and long days you spent working North America (or, worse, Europe), earning some money so that you could stay this place (Antigua) where the sun always shines and where the climate is deliciously hot and dry for the four to ten days you are going to be staying there.- Jamaica Kincaid, A Small PlaceIN HER ESSAY A SMALL PLACE,1 Jamaica Kincaid's pointed and disturbing humour eloquently highlights the self-serving perspective of many tourists who visit the Caribbean, and this case, Antigua. Despite the unmistakable bite of her tone, Kincaid does not always invite readers to laugh aloud at such assertions; instead, revealing the instability and unreliability of European or North American ontological representations of the 'other', she demands that her audience question such constructions. For example, her subtle satire highlights tourists' limited view of the Caribbean and its inhabitants. Specifically, visitors' reductive and patronising assertions that the islands are beautiful in their way and self-serving criticisms of the too green space are unmasked through the author's satire. In these ways, her text is a literary response to the long and complex history of European and North American tourism the archipelago.2 The author's explorations her book and the script of the documentary that followed - Life and Debt (2001)3 - provide an apt model for humour's ability not only to seemingly replicate limiting stereotypes, but also to expose and explode such representations. Many critical studies on Kincaid have brilliantly analysed the sociocultural and ideological mechanics of her trademark humour, but few studies have noted the semantic and semiotic lineage of this type of humour routinely found Caribbean literatures. The long tradition of Caribbean postcards, which predates literary texts like Kincaid's, offers a rich visual genealogy of humour as deployed many of the archipelago's literary works. Postcard studies general are a relatively recent and underdeveloped field of study. Yet there is a significant intertextual relation between Caribbean literary humour and Caribbean postcards. In this essay I examine the hitherto untapped visual archive of counterdiscursive humour constituted by these documents.In the Caribbean, the visual genre has historically had a complex relationship with imperialistic touristic projects. Despite their association with colonialist regimes of representation - that remains visible today - the Caribbean postcards I examine may be said to disempower, discursively, the represented. In the particular case of the Caribbean, the use of humour postcards appears to follow the binary logic of colonial discourse. However, counterdiscursive humour like Kincaid's has long been present these images. In exploring the developments uses of humour Caribbean postcards, I examine the ways which both Europeans/North Americans and Caribbean locals deploy this humour to interrogate the limiting representations of Caribbean identity that such documents deployed. I argue that this long-present humour is more pronounced, and ultimately becomes the locus of subversive discourses that emanate from both the centre and the margins. Unlike notable theorisations of marginalised individuals' uses of humour which emphasise subversive properties as inversion - notably Mikhail Bakhtin's RabeUis and His World4 - this discussion examines the autonomous space created by Caribbean individuals humour, which moves away from such rigid polarisations. In order to examine assertions of autonomy that individuals made as images circulated with the advent of modern tourism the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this study focuses on both machine-made images and those that appear handmade by Caribbean artists commissioned to recreate island life as they experienced it. …