Whether in the absence or stereotypical representation of the resident, or in the identification of the island with its ideal, the foreign gaze and control over representation have their mark. The island element, according to Adam Grydehøj, Yaso Nadarajah and Ulunnguaq Markussen (2020), played a role in the construction of colonial and neocolonial spheres of power. Moreover, we are not talking about a purely imaginary location here – like, for instance, the island of Caliban, whether in William Shakespeare or Aimé Césaire – but about a particular dependency that, according to Yolanda Martínez (2018), remains operational. One could even identify a historical trend in the use of some so-called ‘overseas’ territories as a laboratory or model in the assimilation of other island regions or, we would even say, other continents. Concepts used to refer to islands far from their metropolises such as “overseas territories” or “outermost regions”, used in the European framework, already denote the complex link between insularity and colonialism. Some researchers have projected this link to the constitution of the insular element as a tourist destination, especially when this insularity is linked to geostrategically more “southern” territories of European countries with continental capitals that were “their” metropolises. Helen Kapstein (2017) identifies in this ability to generate “other places” a particular origin, linked to the constitutive imaginary of European nations.
Carla Guerrón (2011) studied the tourist use of the concept of “island paradise” derived from the projection of conceptions such as the “discovery” of islands, even when they are inhabited, and the representations of the colonizers survive in current representations. Thus, for example, although the Caribbean islands are among the most socially and ethnically heterogeneous in popular culture, they are reproduced as simplified and uniform versions, marked by exoticism and exuberance. On the island, time seems to stand still. Islands, Kapstein writes, function as a particular microcosm on which the nation can project its stereotypes. In this sense, Anthony Soares writes that “Today, in a supposedly postcolonial context, islands offer perhaps the most potent, distressing and anomalous images of the neocolonial project, and can therefore be seen as examples of the complex afterlives of empire” (2017: xvi ). In the world of global capitalism, the simplicity of the identification between insularity and colony is challenged by the capacity of islands themselves to generate hierarchical power dynamics (emblematically, in the headquarters of large hotel groups, based in the Balearic Islands and extending their dynamics in the Caribbean). The fact remains, however, that a certain colonial imaginary survives in the representation of the islands, that is, in their audio-visual representation, in the identification of the resident as the servant of the visitor, in the national hierarchies that are imposed in the very dynamics of tourist hospitality. Tina Jamieson, for example, studied it in the permanence of the idea of exoticism that is maintained in the use of certain Pacific islands as wedding venues for tourists who usually come from the former metropolises (Hampton; Jeyacheya 2014). Louis Turner and John Ash (1975) had been writing that tourism, from its beginnings in the nineteenth century, became an agent of “empire” consolidation. It would be worth assessing how late capitalism varies this “imperialist” perception into forms of geostrategic domination or exploitation of natural resources, which no longer respond to the centre-metropolis versus periphery dialectic. This link between colonial ideology and the mythified image of the island would justify, for some, a certain specificity in the development of tourism in island enclaves. The recurrence of island segmentation in tourism promotion, which coexists, of course, with other segmentations equally determined by more or less colonial imaginaries – the desert, the Orient, the indigenous, the wild Nordic landscape, the ‘historical’ cities – seems to accompany this idea which, however, has been questioned.
References:
Grydehøj, Adam; Nadarajah, Yaso; Markussen, Ulunnguaq (2018). “Islands of indigeneity: Cultural Disctinction, Indigenous Territory and Island Spaciality”. Area, 52(1): 14-22.
Guerrón Montero, Carla (2011). “On Tourism and the Constructions of ‘Paradise islands’ in Central America and the Caribbean”. Bulletin of Latin American Research, 30: 1. 21-34.
Kapstein, Helen (2017). Postcolonial Nations, Islands, and Tourism. Londres i Nova York: Rowman i Littlefield International.
Martínez, Yolanda (2018). “Colonialismo y decolonialidad archipelágica en el Caribe”. Tabula Rasa: revista de humanidades, 29. 37-64.
Turner, Louis; Ash, John (1975). The Golden Hordes: International Tourism and the Pleasure Periphery. Nova York: St. Martin’s Press.