Introduction: from Paradise island to Anthropocene island
Itâs an unusually overcast day on the island of New Providence, the most populated island of the Bahamian archipelago. I find myself far from the cruise ships and congestion of Nassau, and far from the beaches and hotels that skirt the coast. I am âway out westâ on, of all places, a small farm, my feet planted firmly in the dirt. The air smells faintly of arugula, and it is still quite warm despite the clouds. I find myself far from the beaten path out on the farm because I am exploring emergent forms of self-described âsustainable tourismâ in The Bahamas to understand the early effects of recent geographical imaginaries on the countryâs physical space and cultural politics.
To know how far this farm is from the standard form of Bahamian âtourism productâ, one needs to know about The Bahamas and Bahamian tourism.1 The Bahamas is a former British colony and Caribbean archipelago of 700 islands and cays, with a population approaching 380,000. In 2010, ninety percent of the population identified as black, descended from enslaved peoples. Over 250,000 people live on New Providence, the seat of the nationâs urban capital, Nassau.2 New Providence is also the site of the majority of tourist arrivals to the country, numbering in the millions annually, and the site of the countryâs largest hotels and resorts.3 In The Bahamas, tourism comprises 48% of the GDP, making it the ninth most tourism dependent country in the world relative to its size (WTTC, 2017). This is the culmination of decades of strong marketing campaigns made by the Bahamian tourism industry, institutionalized within the Bahamian government in the form of the Ministry of Tourism (Cleare, 2007).
Howie and Lewis explain that, âthe idea of geographical âimaginariesâ is an attempt to capture not only that there are multiple geographical imaginations at large in the world, but that they do work in framing understandings of the world and in turn making our different worlds, and that particular imaginaries are willfully put to work with political affect and effectâ (2014, p. 132). Marketing campaigns in the United States, Canada, and Europe have historically sold The Bahamas as a specific kind of geographic imaginary: the paradise island. This imaginary has always been imbued with colonial tropes of smiling black servitude, the segregation of whiter privileged populations within resort enclaves, and tropical Edenic nature that exists outside of the civilized world. The paradise island imaginary has long been the basis of the Bahamian tourism brand in the global travel market, a brand that Bahamian scholar Ian Strachan calls âparadise and plantationâ (2002), but that is referred to as âsun, sand, and seaâ within the tourism industry itself (Cameron & Gatewood, 2008).
Since at least the 1950s, this imaginary-as-brand has animated the spread of exploitative capital in the archipelago via tourism, leading to the development of large hotels, the dredging of waterfront for large cruise ships and yachts, and the expansion of the nationâs international airport to accommodate more and larger planes. In addition to the growth of the industry, the Bahamian scholar Angelique Nixon argues that this travel imaginary has supported a white, upper class, heteronormative, and Christian traveler as the most desired traveler for the Bahamian tourist market (2015). Thus, the paradise island imaginary has been an effective tool for continuing the colonial segregation of space via white supremacy in New Providence, even after independence in 1973. Wealthier, whiter residents and visitors dominate stretches of coastal territory in resorts and gated communities, while the majority of the black and less-white population live in land-locked subdivisions, aspiring to âgood hotel jobsâ serving that coastal flux of visitors (Johnson, 1997).
As a result of the success of the paradise island imaginary, most tourists do not yet think of farming when they think of The Bahamas (Cleare, 2007). Both Ian Strachan and Angelique Nixon argue that the standard Bahamian (and Caribbean) tourism product is evacuated of history, obscuring the environmental impacts of mass visitation while enabling neocolonial relations of servitude and mastery between island âhostsâ and visiting âguestsâ. And yet, as members of the travel industry observe, the Bahamian paradise island brand may be weakening in the face of competing beach destinations entering the global and regional market for travelers (Moore, 2010). After drops following the World Trade Center attacks of 11 September 2001, and the recent Great Recession, visitor numbers are stable, but they are not substantially growing (Trading Economics, 2016).4
Recent events show that the paradise island brand has further cracks. The Bahamas, like many small islands, is already experiencing the stresses of global environmental change. These are the âAnthropocene challengesâ that are increasing the countryâs vulnerability and decreasing its resilience: sea level rise, shifting weather patterns, increased storm intensity and frequency, overfishing, coral degradation, dependence on petroleum-based energy, over-development, loss of fresh water, loss of species, increased presence of regional migrants and refugees, and population increase (Moore, 2016). For example, sea level rise and coastal erosion leads to shrinking coastlines, causing the government to spend on sand replenishment at popular beaches (Campbell, 2012). Further, as local seafood becomes scarcer due to the consumptive habits of tourists and locals, prices for seafood products rise, rapidly outpacing that of imported seafood in grocery stores and disappearing from hotel menus (personal observation and communication from Nassau residents and members of the hotel industry). These are just some ways that the paradise island imaginary-as-brand is threatened by the realities of global environmental insecurity.
But instead of being overtaken by these realities, fears of global anthropogenic change are rearticulated within some tourism ventures that are strategically utilizing such realities as opportunities for more tourism-based enterprise. And in addition to the all-inclusive resort with its extreme consumption of resources and energy, its extreme output of waste, and its importation of industrial scale labor, materials, and food, we now have examples of âsustainableâ hotels and visitor experiences that are designed to impart a more place-based authenticity. This is not necessarily ecotourism [which is explicitly based on environmental and cultural preservation and education (Honey, 1999; Weaver, 2001)], but it is intentionally greener tourism than mass tourism, branded under the sign of sustainability and implicitly framed by the Anthropocene idea. What is now known as âsustainable tourismâ in this context emerges from a central irony: the expansion of tourism into new spaces exacerbates global environmental change, and at the same time the tourism industry creates products and imaginaries that stem from ideas about global environmental change to accumulate more space for more tourism.
In light of such events, scholars of tourism point out that international tourism is evolving in creative ways (Mostafanezhad, Norum, Shelton, & Thompson-Carr, 2016). Thus, the need to understand the significance of rebranded tourist imaginaries for emergent Anthropocene inspired travel markets â like the small island farm â is what brought me to the center of New Providence, my resort wear exchanged for sturdy shoes and shorts. I have been studying events at the intersection of ecology and tourism in The Bahamas as an anthropologist for over a decade. My observations here stem from accumulated research visits since 2007 and on specific ethnographic experiences with a dive voluntourist program concerning coral restoration in 2014 and on an organic agritourist farm in 2016.
This piece is a conceptual exploration beyond the standard research article, although it does provide ethnographic evidence. The work presented here is the result of a âsituated adventureâ in emergent practices, an attempt to disarticulate adventure and exploration from their colonial referents (including anthropology) and reclaim them as tools for decolonizing tourism studies. Adventures are journeys of inherent risk and uncertainty in which the outcome is not known at the outset. For tourism studies, adventures also imply the commodification and domestication of risk and exoticism within experiential business ventures that attract tourist dollars. Situated adventures (adapting Haraway, 1997) are, therefore, a mode of engagement with destinations that allow the tourism scholar to experience given tourism products and ventures (the line between scholar and tourist has always been quite blurry after all) while necessarily observing how such products align with asymmetrical neocolonial realities to transform local space and place into something new in ways that risk reinforcing those asymmetries. Situated adventures force readers to rethink and relearn their vacations. Political ecologists of contemporary tourism should experiment with this reflexive mode of engagement.
While inspired by a number of literatures, this article most immediately builds off of the work of Ian Strachan and Angelique Nixon who, among others, have been instrumental in decolonizing the paradise island imaginary in the Caribbean, demanding that scholars recognize the colonial legacies embedded in that tourism product while pushing to create alternative realities and imaginaries. The discussion builds off of this work of cultural analysis, combining a critical reading of tourism with a political ecological interest in the inequities stemming from particular intersections of nature and capital. Coinciding with the goals of this special issue, this article examines local imaginaries, materialities, and opportunities recreated in a tourism dependent economy in an era of global environmental change. The goal is to demonstrate a reflexive mode of political ecological research for the Anthropocene equipped to tackle emergent practices and ironies at the intersection of postcolonial tourism, environmental conservation, and sustainable development.
The remainder of this article explores Anthropocene space as an emergent travel product stemming from the Anthropocene island imaginary-as-brand. These concepts are grounded in two emergent âfarmâ examples from the island of New Providence, exploring them both above and below the surface of the sea. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these adventures in sustainable tourism for The Bahamas, the Caribbean, and tourism in general while returning to Strachan and Nixonâs concern about alternatives to neocolonial tourism in the region.
