Abstract
Wilkes focuses on the historical and visual representations of Jamaica in guidebooks and travelers’ accounts which promoted tourism in the late nineteenth century as a strategy to maintain the power structures as they had existed under colonialism. The scrutiny of dark-skinned female bodies was a particular pastime of Anglo-American travelers to the Caribbean, in which Jamaica was represented through the “native” black female body. The chapter draws attention to the presence and absence of the white subject in the historical visual texts and goes on to reveal the transformations in the use of the dark-skinned woman in the tropical landscape to represent Jamaica as a sexualized tourist destination.
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Notes
- 1.
“The Lesser Antilles: a Guide for Settlers to the British West Indies”
The Spectator Archive, April 12, 1890, the review of the book can be accessed via this link:
http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/12th-april-1890/24/the-lesser-antilles-a-guide-for-settlers-in-the [Last accessed September 22, 2015].
- 2.
Round Hill Hotel and Villas was built using the concept that it would be a retreat for wealthy individuals. The history of Round Hill can be accessed via this link: http://www.roundhill.com/history-en.html [Last accessed October 30, 2015].
- 3.
The UCL Legacies of British Slave Ownership project provides details of the £20 million that was paid to former slave owners at the end of slavery. Details of the project can be accessed via this link: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/details/ [Last accessed June 1, 2015].
http://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/aestheticism-and-decadence
- 4.
See Rikke Andreassen’s (2015) Human Exhibitions: Race, Gender and Sexuality in Ethnic Displays, which discusses the display of people of African and Asian origin to educate and entertain. They were displayed in Denmark’s Copenhagen zoo at the end of the nineteenth century up to the beginning of the twentieth century.
- 5.
In 2013, the company Real Bronx Tours suspended tourist bus tours through the Bronx after neighborhood residents expressed their concerns about the misrepresentation of the area. A Huffington Post article about the tours can be accessed via this link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/23/bronx-ghetto-tours-offered-real-bronx-tours-canceled_n_3324815.html [Last accessed September 21, 2015].
- 6.
Thomas Thistlewood died in 1786 (Burnard 2004: 260).
- 7.
As opposed to the “French Riviera,” which was popular with wealthy Europeans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
- 8.
The Jamaica Tourist Board ad was published in the New Yorker, magazine September 14, 1968: 38–39.
- 9.
The California Girls online store sells items described as “vintage Black Americana.” Images of similar items can be accessed via this link: http://www.rubylane.com/item/370999-5639/Black-Americana-Metal-Sprinklin-Sambo-Lawn [Last accessed September 22, 2015].
- 10.
The 1962 James Bond film Dr No, which is set in Jamaica, features a beach scene, where Ursula Andress emerges out of the sea. Her blond Aryan body can be viewed as “exotic” in the tropical setting. I owe this observation to Steve Garner, who pointed it out to me. I would suggest that this scene is facilitated by the associations made with racialized female bodies, water, and sexuality established by James Henry Stark (1898) and his contemporaries.
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Wilkes, K. (2016). Resurrecting Colonialism: Tourism in Jamaica During the Nineteenth Century and Beyond. In: Whiteness, Weddings, and Tourism in the Caribbean. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50391-6_5
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