Whiteness, Weddings, and Tourism in the Caribbean

Paradise for Sale

Karen Wilkes

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137503909
• eBook ISBN: 9781137503916
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines myths of the Caribbean as paradise. These myths are used as a backdrop to market destination white weddings. The book is interdisciplinary and uses historical and contemporary visual texts to examine the way in which middle class white womanhood assumes a decorative, privileged, and elevated position within contemporary images of destination weddings in the Caribbean. To facilitate the notion of the Caribbean as paradise, the book argues that this production of luxury is highly dependent on the positioning of blackness as servitude. To this end, tourism marketing appropriates the Caribbean's history of slavery; transforming the region into a site where whiteness can consume black labor as luxury.

© The Author(s) 2016

Karen WilkesWhiteness, Weddings, and Tourism in the Caribbean10.1057/978-1-137-50391-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Karen Wilkes¹

(1)

Birmingham City University, Birmingham, UK

End Abstract

Internet technologies facilitate the dissemination of visual discourses of island paradise and romance to a new generation of privileged travelers through the promotion of destination weddings. This is a growing trend. It is estimated that 25 % of US couples choose to have a destination wedding.¹ Mintel’s consumer research estimates that in the UK, up to 20 % of ceremonies take place abroad where neither the bride nor the groom has family, or is a resident or citizen.² The destination wedding is a niche product for the tourist industry, and the Caribbean is a particularly popular destination due to the images of the Caribbean fulfilling “Western ideas of [paradise and] a romantic other” (C.M. Hall and H. Tucker 2004: 10). The “global market place” (Borgerson and Schroeder 2002: 572) is the context in which Sandals actively sells the Caribbean as a paradise destination and attainable luxury, through its interactive web site and high-quality glossy brochures.³

Say “I do” in Paradise.

The Caribbean has long been associated with romance; the palm-shaded beaches, dreamlike surroundings and the sultry nights create an ideal backdrop for love. Sandals, the Caribbean family-owned resorts, pioneered the Caribbean wedding in order to offer the paradise settings of their island resorts for unforgettable destination weddings and heavenly honeymoons. Sandals (2014)

Through these representations, postcolonial island states such as Jamaica, Antigua, and St Lucia are packaged as “exotic,” luxurious vacation wedding sites that offer brides an all-inclusive princess wedding experience (Wilkes 2013). The Sandals promotional text presented here “informs” prospective guests that “the Caribbean has long been associated with romance.” It is a statement which suggests a natural, taken-for-granted longevity of a place that appears to be beyond question, as it draws on established myths of Western ideas of paradise as tropical beach landscapes—a setting which provides a context for the privileging of heterosexual marriage and romanticizes sex by referring to the Caribbean climate as “sultry.” Both meanings of the word “sultry” are used in the text to reinforce the idea of the Caribbean as a heterosexual haven: firstly, the Caribbean climate as tropical, hot, and humid (bringing to mind the idea that the temperature permits scant clothing and in the Western imagination this is frequently read as sexual freedom; see Borgerson and Schroeder 2002); and, secondly, it suggests sexual passion—a destination where sexual passion/liaisons can take place.

A discursive logic is created through the dissemination of images of the Caribbean as predominantly beach landscapes. They are ubiquitous as they appear on the television, on billboards, on the sides of buses and taxis, and in traditional print media and reach wider markets via visual media technologies. The images that accompany the texts that describe the Caribbean as a sexual haven are the vehicles used to secure meanings of gender, race, and class as they intersect with contemporary cultural practices of leisure for transnational mobile subjects. Ideas and myths of the Caribbean as paradise are “embedded” (Burns et al. 2010: xvii) within the nature of tourism as visual culture, and by producing “its own set of social realities” (Simmons 2004: 45), this discourse appears to be beyond scrutiny (Burns et al. 2010: xvii). This is particularly significant for audiences with no experience or with limited knowledge of the Caribbean. The visual rhetoric produced by media representations can be used as “stand in” (Borgerson and Schroeder 2002: 571) for “experience as a source of information … when experience is lacking” (Borgerson and Schroeder 2002: 571). As information is the key ingredient for success in the twenty-first century (Castells 2010), images which provide information in the form of repeated myths about paradise are able to convince the potential tourist that the destination depicted is a place that they actually “know.” The fact that readers of tourism images are convinced by the ubiquitous illusions (Bourdieu cited in d’Hauteserre 2005: 202) circulated via so many visual technological media platforms (Schroeder 2002; Spencer 2011) may lead these audiences to believe that “[we] seem to know more and more about each other than we ever did” (Pitcher 2014: 1). Indeed, visual discourse “lulls [sic] viewers into believing that seeing is understanding” (Schroeder 2002: 12). However, an analysis of the images used to market Caribbean destination weddings offers insight into the global issues of travel, identity, economic power, and racial and social inequalities. This also draws attention to the “legacies of colonialism” (Parker and Song 2001: 13) as power relations that appear to “elevate” the first-world tourists above their “third-world” hosts (Simmons 2004: 45).

Images could be described as “socio-political artefacts” (Borgerson and Schroeder 2002: 570) (creations which provide information about our culture), as they have the power to create, shape, and structure our understanding of ourselves and our relations with race through a system of visual language. In the contemporary context, how we understand ourselves and others continues to happen principally through the categories of age, able-bodied, race, class, gender, and sexuality. Images communicate representations of these categories, by utilizing myths, which as Roland Barthes argues, “myth hides nothing: its function is to distort” [emphasis in the original] (Barthes 1972[2013]: 231); myths have the “power to convince, to hypnotise, to present a world which seems normal” (Spencer 2011: 167) and desirable within “a visually saturated culture” (Gombrich 1996 and Mirzoeff 1999 cited in Spencer 2011: 11). Where the Caribbean exists to fulfill fantasies of the island paradise, the world is able to continue to deny “its own social stratifications” (Anim-Addo 2007: 17). Despite the reported inequalities that are exacerbated by tourism within countries (2002; Thompson 2006) and between regions, the appropriation and repackaging of formerly colonized spaces continue.

During a seminar in the second year of my undergraduate studies, I was given a page from a tourist brochure advertising holidays in Jamaica. I was interested in this representation as there were no black Jamaicans included in the image. The visual text signified a notion of whiteness that appeared to effortlessly be projected onto a postcolonial island in the Caribbean. Tourist brochures are important examples of contemporary visual culture and there is a significant tradition of analyzing tourist images (Dann 1996; Selwyn 1996; Cohen 1992) which is supported by the view that “the tourist brochure is probably the most conspicuous element of the commodification process and recognized as vital in communicating the tourism product across geographical and cultural differences” (Dann, cited in Robinson, 1999: 13). I was/and am interested in the “it-goes-without-saying” messages in images, which began with my encounter with Jamaica represented by white leisured subjects. This journey has led me to write Whiteness, Weddings, and Tourism in the Caribbean: Paradise for Sale (hereafter Whiteness, Weddings, and Tourism).

It is also the case that the black American middle class may find elements of such representations appealing. Strachan (2002) notes that middle-class black people are not exempt from internalizing stereotypes of blackness as primitive and inferior, and to sufficiently convey “success”, Stephen Nathan Haymes (1995) argues that middle-class black subjects are also encouraged to embrace the values of the free market through consumption of exoticized blackness (Haymes 1995: 58; see also Strachan 2002).

In an economic context which “demands high levels of consumption” (Bartky 2010: 416), high-quality crafted images of heterosexual couples strolling on empty white beaches and those mass-produced images of the Caribbean conjure up ideas of paradise and escape for largely white European and American tourists (Wint 2012; David Barber, Deputy Director of Jamaica Tourist Board, 2001). The repetition of these images encourages the manufactured content (Uzzell 1984) to be viewed as ordinary and so normative that they appear to have no historical, ideological, or political origins. Indeed, rather than telling us about the cultural, political, or economic context of the Caribbean region, the images provide insight into the desires and aspirations of the dominant cultural group. Whiteness, Weddings, and Tourism is concerned with the ways in which the Caribbean has been appropriated and transformed into an apparently uninhabited space, to display luxurious white weddings on “empty” white beaches.

Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact. (Roland Barthes 1972 [2013]: 255–256)

The rhetoric of images, myths, and discourses of the Caribbean as a homogeneous paradise have much to tell us about global media’s tracks of power and “political logic” (McCann and Kim 2010: 5), and their role in maintaining “system(s) of rule” (Hall 1996b: 254). These systems operate within the neoliberal context where the normative “meanings of gender” (McCann and Kim 2010: 15) and associated social positions are “incorporated into cultural practices (ceremonies, customs, and traditions)” (ibid). As Stuart Hall (1996b) asserts, distinctions should not be drawn between systems of rule and power, and systems of knowledge and representation. They are inseparable. The relationship between power and knowledge is well established (Foucault 1980) and tourism images which draw on nineteenth-century “tales of explorers and travellers” (Gabriel 1994: 146) produced in a neoliberal context via global media are also creators of knowledge. These systems are able to reaffirm traditional racialized gender relations as they draw on existing discourse...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Using Intersectionality to Challenge Visual Myths of Paradise
• 3. White Masculine Voices and Their Construction of the Colonized Woman as Sexual Primitive
• 4. Procuring White Femininity in the Colonies
• 5. Resurrecting Colonialism: Tourism in Jamaica During the Nineteenth Century and Beyond
• 6. The Postfeminist Bride and the Neoliberal White Wedding in Postcolonial Jamaica
• 7. Feted and Pampered Whiteness in a (Post)colonial Paradise
• 8. Conclusion
• Backmatter