Paradise and Plantation by Ian Strachan
Introduction
Strachan begins his introduction by pointing out the central role that television and print ads play in constructing our ideas about the Caribbean as a paradise. The Caribbean of these ads (which are typically produced by foreign firms hired by local tourist ministries) does not resemble the one that would be familiar to indigenous residents and instead portray an idea of the Caribbean that is carefully constructed both in the ads and in the structure of the tourist experience. Revues of local culture for hotel audiences are "often caricatured displays, removed from the communities of people who allegedly created them" and "when they are not producing the exotic, Caribbeans are cultivating a colonial past that ads to the visitor's sense of a quaint island atmosphere" (2).
Paradise and Plantation
The book seeks to "identify historical, political, economic, cultural and geographic conditions that make the Caribbean an ideal location for paradise and discuss the means by which this idea has thrived. We wish to understand why the representation of the Caribbean as a paradise has persisted in spite of social, cultural, political, and economic phenomena that clearly embody anything but earthly bliss: the plantation" (3). Noting that paradise works differently invoked in the work of Derek Walcott than in that of Christopher Columbus, the authors identify both "the imperialist-colonial economy of wealth extraction and exploitation" and "an often anti-imperialist counter - economy . . . that concerns self-worth"; their project is unusual in that it proposes to simultaneously address both.
The paradise with which the Caribbean is primarily associated is "the prelapsarian, pre-civilized Garden of Eden, the Paradise on Earth inhabited by humanity at the time of Creation." The sense of plantation with which Strachan is concerned here is that described by George L. Beckford in Persistent Poverty (1972) - an institution designed to meet the needs of the mother country, using coerced labor and affecting every aspect of the lives of those who work on it, and one which results in unemployment, low income, unequal distribution of income, underutilization of land and underconsumption. Strachan argues that "the plantation has been the principal shaping force of Caribbean life, past and present, on every island where it was successfully adopted as the mode of production and the apparatus of rule" (6). While relying heavily on Beckford for his account of the plantation here, he point out that he "does not account for the range of cultural cross-fertilizations that were a part of the Caribbean event" - the need for this kind of work drives Strachan's examination of "the deployment of the metaphors 'paradise' and 'plantation' in the literatures and ideologies of and about the Caribbean from both outside and within the region" (7).
The Plantation Hotel
Strachan points out that "Caribbean plantations have functioned successfully without slavery for close to two hundred years and sets up a discussion of the hotel as plantation with the observation that "Like sugar, coffee, or banana production, tourism is an 'export industry,' in as much as the Caribbean 'product' is marketed and sold to consumers in the North Atlantic" (8). Like the plantation, tourism affects government policy; tourism also extends a dependence on metropolitan consumption established under the plantation economy; also like on the plantation, employees in hotels can and do sabotage production through deliberate mistakes and inefficiencies.
The Black Tourist
The Caribbean is important in African American consciousness as both a shared history (slaves bound for the US were often sent there to be "seasoned") and a model for black resistance to domination. Beginning with the 1791 Haitian Revolution, the Caribbean was an important model for imagining black sovereignty, and Haiti was also later considered as a possible destination for African American emigration (12). The Caribbean was also touted, "especially during the New Negro Movement of the 1920s, as a place where the folk culture of Africa was vibrant and more intact than in the United States" (13). These connections inform some African American tourism in the Caribbean today, but may others also go seeking the same leisure and escape white tourists seek, and "Confronting the black Caribbean hotel worker, both the white and the black tourist may believe that their money and their citizenship in the most powerful nation in the world give them privileges, a higher position on the socioevolutionary ladder" (13).
The introduction ends with an example of the flattening out of Caribbean islands and cultures in the American imagination as evinced in the belief that all Caribbeans sound like Jamaicans, and with the eroticization of the Caribbean male as evinced in a Bill Crosby joke and the 1998 film How Stella Got Her Groove Back.