Imagining the Tropics

Women, Romance, and the Making of Modern Tourism

Elizabeth S. Manley, Elizabeth Manley

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781978826892, 9781978826908
• eBook ISBN: 9781978826915
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

Imagining the Tropics is a history of the development of tourism in the Caribbean from the 1910s through the 1970s that focuses on the ways women's labors of hospitality, writing, and advocacy built the industry and its ubiquitous imagery of tropical island relaxation, escape, and romance. By examining a range of sources, engaging an array of women protagonists, and looking broadly across multiple Caribbean island-states including Jamaica, Cuba, the Bahamas, Barbados, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago, and the U.S. and British Virgin Islands, it seeks to understand how the region came to be sold as a romantic escape from the "troubles" of the modern world. By putting women at the center of Caribbean tourism history—as both its ambassadors and objects of desire—it seeks to explain some of the complicated contradictions that plague the business of pleasure but also to point toward ways of building alternative models to its present and past extractive realities.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Map
• Introduction: Travel and Tropical Romance: Understanding Caribbean Tourism through Gender
• 1. “Just on the Edge of Adventure”: Women Explorers, Social Science, and the Caribbean’s “Rich, Unexplored Field” (1910s–1920s)
• 2. Timeless Playgrounds in an “Endless June”: Women and the Travel Infrastructures of the Interwar Caribbean (1910s–1930s)
• 3. “The Fraternity Who Love the Islands”: Tourism Development and the Scripting of Caribbean Culture (1925–1945)
• 4. Creating “Caribbean Vacationlands”: Concocting the Cultured Tropicalities of Postwar Travel (1945–1960)
• 5. A “Rich and Cosmopolitan Past”: Women and the Solidification of Island Romance (1960–1980)
• Conclusion: Building Something Different?
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author
• Series List