According to the World Travel and Tourism Council, the tourist industry is providing
one in nine jobs and eighty per cent of travellers come from just twenty countries. In
other words, in a changing global economy, tourism is a matter of economic imperative
for the Majority World, and privileged mobility for the Minority.
The economic dependency of the Eastern Caribbean on tourism has been well-
documented (Ferguson 1997, Lea 1998, Patullo 1996). A large element of its
attractiveness depends on its connotations of paradise in the Minority World, and
therefore it is an economic necessity that paradise is continually simulatable. The
widespread development of all-inclusive resorts, or what Bauman has termed
‘reservation-style experiences’ (1998: 58), organises social space as a simulacra of widely
circulated images, and it is a structuration which approaches culture as a factor of risk
and uncertainty. Furthermore, not only does a large amount of tourist/host contact take
place within this confinement, but it is increasingly the normative setting for
representations of the Caribbean in media texts.
In this paper I do not wish to re-examine arguments concerning the social
unsustainability of this form of tourism, as I think that can be taken as read. My focus
will be the way in which this kind of tourism provides a framework for imagining and
gazing upon the Caribbean, and the problems this presents for island identities. Central
to this is the question of identity and globalisation, that nebulous process which drives
the increase in the type of tourism which is under discussion. An influential current in
global theory is to analyse the way in which processes engendered in the economic
sphere result in cultural phenomenon which are delinked from any simplistic notion of
economic causality. While this is generally sustainable, I wish to argue that the precise
form of tourism which defines the Caribbean’s entry into this global market has a
structuring influence on the cultural, precisely because it is the cultural which has been
fundamentally commodifie
