PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness

Aaron Kamugisha

Mimi Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (London and New York: Routledge, 2003).

Ian Gregory Strachan, Paradise and Plantation: Tourism and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2002).

Reviewed by Aaron Kamugisha

Though they often do not realize it, the West Indians of today cannot afford to go on regarding this region as a tropical estate to be exploited for its economic returns. Whether they like it or not, this is their home. So, we need to face the problems of making the West Indies a more acceptable physical and social environment for ourselves and those who may come after us. Even now, we often have only the vaguest understanding of the true nature of our present ambiguous situation.

-- Elsa Goveia, Past History and Present Planning in the West Indies (1966)

Mimi Sheller’s Consuming the Caribbean is one of the most interesting and provocative books to come out in the field of Caribbean Studies in the last decade. Sheller positions her study as “an analysis of the ‘invention’ of the idea of the Caribbean in Euro-American culture” (8). She produces an outstanding intellectual history of this invention, and what is meant for global imaginings of the Caribbean at the beginning of the 21st century.

A central argument of Consuming the Caribbean is that our efforts to understand Western exploitation of the Caribbean are considerably enhanced if we recognize that precious metals and plantation agriculture were not the only motivational factors driving conquest and colonization, but “the desire to acquire new edible, pleasurable, and pharmaceutical substances, things that had direct and powerful effects on the bodies of those empowered to consume them” (77, original emphasis). The consumption of the Caribbean by the West has thus taken place in many spheres of human activity, from the devouring of its agricultural products (particularly sugar cane and bananas), the annihilation of its original inhabitants, the theft of its natural resources (precious metals, plants, human bodies), and the offering up of it as an image through which the West can theorize about race and cultural mixing. Sheller’s use of the trope of “consumption” is therefore complex and multilayered:

It is not only things or commodities that are consumed, but also entire natures, landscapes, cultures, visual representations, and even human bodies . . . Playing on the interlocking meanings of ‘Carib’ and ‘cannibal’ ever since Columbus’s confused arrival in the New World a typology of forms of material and symbolic consumption can be proposed. These include ingestion, invasion, incorporation, infection, appropriation, sacrifice, and exhibition, as well as various processes of possessing, destroying, using up, and wasting away. Thus I take consumption in the broadest sense, and use it as a way of understanding a broad set of relations that are at once economic, political, cultural, social, and emotional (14).

Consumption of the Caribbean, then, “occurs first through its displacement from the narrative of Western modernity (decontextualization), followed by its recontextualization as an ‘Other’ to serve the purposes of Western fantasy” (144). This utilization of consumption allows Sheller to survey a wide variety of different representations of the Caribbean, from depictions of Caribbean landscapes across four centuries to Hollywood’s depictions of the twentieth century Caribbean. The popular portrayal of the indigenous Kalinago (Carib) people of the Caribbean as “cannibals” is turned on its head in the section (one of the finest in the book) titled “Killing, Enslaving, Torturing, and Touching Bodies” in which it is argued that when we consider the sheer scale of Western appropriation and exploitation of Native Caribbean and Africans bodies in the Caribbean, and the incredible loss of life fueled by plantation slavery, the question “who was eating whom” must occur to us (143).

Consuming the Caribbean is, however, far more than merely a weary cataloguing of horrors and injustices past and present. One of the highlights of the text is the real wealth of travelogues that Sheller mobilizes to make her case. I was overwhelmed by the meticulousness of Sheller’s research, particularly the innovative means by which she teases out the nature of the “Orienting” of the Caribbean in the 19th century European imagination. Sheller’s speculations on how the “geography of the discourse” (to use Valentin Mudimbe’s phrase) of Orientalism moved from the East to the Caribbean due to the presence of indentured workers from Asia, is one of the single most original aspects of her work. The final chapter, intended as a critique of the uses to which Caribbean theoretical understandings are put by metropolitan critics (one section is titled “Theoretical Piracy on the High Seas of Global Culture”) makes its point well, though I wished she had pressed it home harder and drawn more specific conclusions about the responsibilities of theorists. Her concluding wish, that her book “contributes to the foundations for building a more ethical relationship based on acknowledging complicity in relations of domination and with that an intimate responsibility for others” (201), is one many might share, but it suggests that the target of her book is the Western academic consumer. It also seems somewhat different from her earlier salutary claim that “the overall thrust of my work is to support the claim for reparations” (4). Altogether, nonetheless, Consuming the Caribbean is a valuable contribution to knowledge on the region that will undoubtedly be put to a variety of uses by its readers.

If tourism – or the foreign traveler’s gaze and institutionalization of this gaze – permeates all of Sheller’s text, Ian Strachan deals with this theme more directly in his Paradise and Plantation: Tourism and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean. Strachan takes two of the central ideas used to imagine the Caribbean over the last five hundred years – “paradise” and “plantation” – and proceeds to show not just how central they are to Caribbean life, but the ways in which both are strangely dependent on each other. As concepts, paradise and plantation appear in an extraordinarily diverse array of places, and are used to justify positions from an imperial gaze to an “anti-colonial” one.

In his first couple of chapters, Strachan traverses in an interesting and succinct manner some relatively familiar scholarly ground on the historical images of the Caribbean in the Western imagination. Chapter three, “Paradise Is Plantation” is the centerpiece of the book. It provides all of the evidence Strachan needs to support his claim that “tourism is an indispensable part of the plantation economy” (7). Strachan’s focuses on the Bahamas to make his argument, a good choice since the Bahamas may well be the purest example of the plantation/tourism economy in the region. The tourism sector accounted for up to 72% of Bahamian exports in 1992 (8), tourist arrivals outnumber locals by 14:1 during a typical calendar year (132), and consistently over 50% of the gross national product is derived from tourism (93). These figures all point to the overwhelming impact of tourism on Bahamian and Caribbean economies, and the extent to which the mobilization of wealth is critically dependent on the ability to create the perception that foreign tastes will be satisfied in the Caribbean.

The most critical point to be taken from the analysis of tourism that is presented by Strachan is the ways in which tourism configures Caribbean people’s citizenship in the post-independence Caribbean. This allows for a more penetrating critique of it as an enterprise in total. One feature of the purest versions of the “tourism economy” is that far more people enter the island as visitors annually than there actually are citizens in the country. Trumpeted by tourism managers, this seemingly innocuous observation, which is subjected to little analysis within the Caribbean, is noteworthy as it problematizes understandings of who constitutes the citizen within the tourist economy. The dependence of the tourist economy on the visitor means that production within the island is geared with him/her in mind. This production may take the form of food (often imported at a profit for those who control the distributive sector), entertainment, cultural performances, and a whole variety of goods and services both legal and illegal. Laws can be broken at will by tourists in a manner which would result in their incarceration if they were “locals,” while crimes committed against tourists are subjected to far more detailed investigation and swifter prosecution than crimes against “locals.” Landscapes are rigorously reconfigured to present a vision that the tourist might enjoy, a process that may mean the production of a fictionalized history, the enclosure of certain desirable spaces along the shoreline, and the rehabilitation of capital cities and towns to more closely approximate models to be found in the urban north Atlantic. Movements for black economic enfranchisement or any radical redress of structural socio-economic inequalities must first be thought of in terms of tourist tastes and their effect on the tourism industry. They are of course scuttled when, on reflection, deemed inappropriate. That the typical visitor is a white westerner means that again the west consumes the Caribbean, by means not noticeably discernable from the colonial period.

What is perhaps even more disturbing than this is what all of these seemingly unconnected events mean for the status of the tourist. The tourist occupies the space of what we might call an “extra-territorial citizen.” His/her desires are analyzed before s/he arrives, indeed before the thought of even visiting the country has entered his/her mind. The time spent in the country is a carefully orchestrated event in which a country is not just created as a mythical event (as in the advertisements that draw him/her to it) but is materially constructed to suits his/her desires with a tremendous amount of epistemic (and occasionally physical) violence to the country’s permanent residents. After his/her departure, efforts are continually made to have him/her return. If this same effort was conceivably made to assess the needs and aspirations of Caribbean citizens, the Caribbean might, as the old cliché goes, actually be a better place to live. As it is, despite popular protests of these practices by Caribbean state managers, Caribbean citizens often feel “like an alien in we own land.”1

Paradise and Plantation is an ingenious and thoughtful contribution to Caribbean scholarship, but a number of questions remain about Strachan’s project. Strachan briefly outlines George Beckford’s work, but ignores Lloyd Best, whose much-discussed 1968 essay, “Outline of a Model of Pure Plantation Economy,” is a central contribution to theorizing about plantation society in the Caribbean. The New World Movement’s discussion of “plantation economy” is not engaged by Strachan, to the detriment of his argument. More problematic are a series of equivocations which a close reading of the specific chapters on V.S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott and three Caribbean women writers (Michelle Cliff, Jamaica Kincaid and Paule Marshall) make evident. Strachan vacillates in his critique of Naipaul and Kincaid between an outraged condemnation of their reinscription of colonial understandings and a bewildering defense of some of the same positions put forward by these writers. His comment (after a good summary of criticisms of Naipaul which he evidently shares) that “. . . in attacking the fixation on the charismatic “folk leader,” the quality of “bluff” in many Third World government administrations, and the difficulty in creating a real consciousness of nation among the formerly colonized, Naipaul’s The Mimic Men and The Middle Passage are as useful as Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth” (187), this is simply absurd.2 It is difficult to understand such a patently ridiculous line when faced with the following passage just four pages previously:

Having railed against the sins of the plantation, Naipaul subjects the Caribbean and the entire postcolonial world to a plantation discourse and to a Eurocentric vision that sees culture and nature as well as the value of culture and the value of nature, indeed the value of men and women of color the world over, in ways that best serve European economic and political global supremacy. And Naipaul’s social Darwinist metaphor of the bush is just as appropriate in the Caribbean as it is in Africa. In a 1981 interview, Naipaul remarked that thanks to Rastafarianism, Jamaica was making “several large steps back to the bush” . . . This is the image of postemancipation decay and of waste that Thomas Carlyle drew one hundred years before (183).

In this respect, Strachan’s even-handed outline of the shifts in Derek Walcott’s perception of Africa is more carefully composed, if not altogether convincing (223). His recognition of the similarities between Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place and V.S. Naipaul (235, 239, 243) are useful antidotes to some of the uncritical uses of Kincaid’s work in the academy. Similarly, his considerations of the work of Cliff, Marshall, and (in his conclusion) Margaret Cezair-Thompson’s The True History of Paradise offer generally well placed readings of the paradise/plantation trope as well as the sheer number of ways in which it has been deployed by Caribbean writers to imagine colonial and post-independent conditions, including paradoxically both depictions of commodification and dreams of Caribbean potential--not to mention liberation in the future.

The extent to which Caribbean economies are linked into a world capitalist system that offers them little other than tourism to survive means that Strachan sees little possibilities for moving beyond “brochure discourse” (267). Paradise and Plantation thus ends on a somewhat depressing note, which I think belies the complexity of the Caribbean present and the possibilities for true change. For what the Caribbean also needs is not merely the history of discourses of subordination, but strategies for breaking them.

Notes