Synopses & Reviews
Includes bibliographical references (p. [291]-310) and index.
Synopsis
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.
Synopsis
It is hard to ignore the hotels. They rise likemammoths of iron and concrete above the homes, the office buildings, the trees ofNew Providence, island of my birth. So begins Ian Strachan's history ofthe idea of the Caribbean as paradise. The modern image of the Bahamas as a carefreetourist oasis has its origins in much earlier cultural mythology: the firstcolonizers conceptualized the Caribbean as a place beyond time, beyond the real, andthe region produced profit seemingly without work. Yet an Edenic experience was madepossible only by the existence of the plantation--the very opposite of paradise forthe Amerindians, whose homeland was colonized, and for those brought asslaves.
Examining poetry, plays, novels, travelogues, magazine ads, postcards, posters, brochures, stamps, popular songs, paintings, and illustrations, Paradise andPlantation presents telling links between the myth of a Caribbeanparadise and colonial ideologies and economics. Strachan considers the cultural, economic, and social effects of tourism's brochure discourse inthe modern Caribbean, specifically in the Bahamas, and he enriches his discussionwith a fascinating exploration of the ways postcolonial Caribbean writers such as V.S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, Paule Marshall, Jamaica Kincaid, and Michelle Cliff haveresponded to the paradise-plantationdichotomy.
The conspicuous disparity between theCaribbean's reputation as paradise and the stark social, economic, and politicalrealities of the region is not news. Ian Strachan's genealogy of theparadise-plantation myth goes far beyond the established discourse in paradisestudies, however, providing a new and interdisciplinary approach to further thediscussion.
Table of Contents
Introduction : paradise and imperialism -- Caribbean wasteland -- Paradise is plantation? -- Naipaul's "Garden of hell" -- Walcott's postcolonial Adam -- World out of time -- Conclusion : the true history of paradise.