"It is hard to ignore the hotels. They rise like mammoths of
iron and concrete above the homes, the office buildings, the trees
of New Providence, island of my birth." So begins Ian Strachan's
history of the idea of the Caribbean as paradise. The modern image
of the Bahamas as a carefree tourist oasis has its origins in much
earlier cultural mythology: the first colonizers conceptualized the
Caribbean as a place beyond time, beyond the real, and the region
produced profit seemingly without work. Yet an Edenic experience
was made possible only by the existence of the plantation--the very
opposite of paradise for the Amerindians, whose homeland was
colonized, and for those brought as slaves.
Examining poetry, plays, novels, travelogues, magazine ads,
postcards, posters, brochures, stamps, popular songs, paintings,
and illustrations, "Paradise and Plantation" presents telling links
between the myth of a Caribbean paradise and colonial ideologies
and economics. Strachan considers the cultural, economic, and
social effects of tourism's "brochure discourse" in the modern
Caribbean, specifically in the Bahamas, and he enriches his
discussion with a fascinating exploration of the ways postcolonial
Caribbean writers such as V. S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, Paule
Marshall, Jamaica Kincaid, and Michelle Cliff have responded to the
paradise-plantation dichotomy.
The conspicuous disparity between the Caribbean's reputation as
paradise and the stark social, economic, and political realities of
the region is not news. Ian Strachan's genealogy of the
paradise-plantation myth goes far beyond the established discourse
in paradise studies, however, providing a new and interdisciplinary
approach to further the discussion.
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