Postcolonial Nations Islands And Tourism

Considers how real island spaces have been used in literary texts and the popular imagination to shore up the fiction of the nation in order to offer a new theory of postcolonial nationalism.

Drawing together theoretical and applied research, this fascinating book illuminates the links between tourism, colonialism and postcolonialism. Significantly, it creates a space for the voices of authors from postcolonial countries.

This innovative collection of essays explores the ways in which islands have been used, imagined and theorised, both by island dwellers and continentals. This study considers how island dwellers conceived of themselves and their relation to proximate mainlands, and examines the fascination that islands have long held in the European imagination. The collection addresses the significance of islands in the Atlantic economy of the eighteenth century, the exploration of the Pacific, the important role played by islands in the process of decolonisation, and island-oriented developments in postcolonial writing. Islands were often seen as natural colonies or settings for ideal communities but they were also used as dumping grounds for the unwanted, a practice which has continued into the twentieth century. The collection argues the need for an island-based theory within postcolonial studies and suggests how this might be constructed. Covering a historical span from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the contributors include literary and postcolonial critics, historians and geographers.

This timely and innovative book explores the dynamics of inter-island/island-island tourism – also known as archipelago tourism – on the cusp of the post-pandemic epoch. Embellished with illustrative maps and diagrams, the volume examines what novel approaches have been developed, if at all, so as not to repeat past mistakes, and nurture a more sustainable, 'island tourism' business model. It looks at how the political-economic relationship between main and outer islands changed during the pandemic and, if so, whether this shift has had a bearing on current tourism policy. The book also explores how these and other changes are reflected in how: islands are branded; island destinations are marketed; and island transport logistics play out. An array of archipelagos of varying sizes and locations is explored, assuring a global perspective. The book furthers our understanding of core-periphery dynamics in archipelago tourism. The volume will be of interest to students, researchers, policy makers and academics in the fields of tourism policy and planning, sustainability, island studies and development studies.

From tourist paradises to immigrant detention camps, from offshore finance centres to strategic military bases, islands offer distinct identities and spaces in an increasingly homogenous and placeless world. The study of islands is important, for its own sake and on its own terms. But so is the notion that the island is a laboratory, a place for developing and testing ideas, and from which lessons can be learned and applied elsewhere. The Routledge International Handbook of Island Studies is a global, research-based and pluri-disciplinary overview of the study of islands. Its chapters deal with the contribution of islands to literature, social science and natural science, as well as other applied areas of inquiry. The collated expertise of interdisciplinary and international scholars offers unique insights: individual chapters dwell on geomorphology, zoology and evolutionary biology; the history, sociology, economics and politics of island communities; tourism, wellbeing and migration; as well as island branding, resilience and ‘commoning’. The text also offers pioneering forays into the study of islands that are cities, along rivers or artificial constructions. This insightful Handbook will appeal to geographers, environmentalists, sociologists, political scientists and, one hopes, some of the 600 million or so people who live on islands or are interested in the rich dynamics of islands and island life.

This volume explores tourism in the Caribbean - one of the most tourism dependent regions of the world - within the context of key currents of Caribbean thought and critique in relation to issues of dependency, postcolonial interactions, race and class as well as identity and culture.

Exploring the conceptual insights provided by the archipelagic 'twist' in the context of tourism principles, policies and practices, this volume draws on an international series of case studies to analyse best practice in branding, marketing and logistics in archipelago tourist destinations. The book asks and seeks to answer such questions as: How to 'sell' a multi-island destination, without risking a message that may be too complex and diffuse for audiences to grab on to? Does one encourage visitors to do 'island hopping'; and, if so, how and with what logistic facilities? How does one ascribe specific island destinations within an overall archipelago brand? Would smaller islands rebel against a composite branding strategy that actually benefits other islands? How does one read or craft transport policies as a function of the 'reterritorialisation' of a multi-island space? This book pioneers the exploration of the archipelago as tourism study focus (and not just locus); a heuristic device for rendering islands as sites of different tourism practices, industries and policies, but also of challenges and possibilities.

This book approaches the Arctic from a postcolonial perspective, taking into account both its historical status as a colonised region and new, economically driven forms of colonialism. One catchphrase currently being used to describe these new colonialisms is 'the scramble for the Arctic'. This cross-disciplinary study, featuring contributions from an international team of experts in the field, offers a set of broadly postcolonial perspectives on the European Arctic, which is taken here as ranging from Greenland and Iceland in the North Atlantic to the upper regions of Norway and Sweden in the European High North. While the contributors acknowledge the renewed scramble for resources that characterises the region, it also argues the need to 'unscramble' the Arctic, wresting it away from its persistent status as a fixed object of western control and knowledge. Instead, the book encourages a reassertion of micro-histories of Arctic space and territory that complicate western grand narratives of technological progress, politico-economic development, and ecological 'state change'. It will be of interest to scholars of Arctic Studies across all disciplines.

Making the Modern Primitive provides an anthropological analysis of the encounter between local residents and tourists in the Trobriand Islands, a place renowned in anthropology and represented in various media as "culturally authentic." In such a place, how are ideas about authenticity implicated in creating and representing the self and cultural Others in the context of cultural tourism? Michelle MacCarthy addresses this question by examining four arenas of interaction between Trobriand Islanders and tourists: formal performances, informal village visits, souvenir shopping, and tourist photography. Drawing on both symbolic/interpretive approaches and concepts drawn from economic anthropology, she examines the relationship of tourism to the commoditization of culture, the ways in which local residents actively represent and enact "Trobriandness," and the ways tourists interpret and narrate their experience. MacCarthy offers an anthropological critique of concepts of authenticity, tradition, and cultural commodification, based on long-term fieldwork among Trobriand Islanders and tourists. These notions, which have particular meanings as analytical concepts in anthropology, are also used and strategically deployed in the discourses of both Trobriand Islanders and tourists. Ideas about primitivity and cultural essentialism, while critiqued by anthropologists, are nonetheless used by both parties in tourism interactions to conceptualize and contextualize difference. MacCarthy demonstrate how such tropes are employed in ways that fit with prevailing metanarratives which each side holds about the other, and how these tropes are reproduced both in individual narratives of both tourists' and Trobrianders' experiences and in their interpretations (often misconstrued) of the lives of cultural Others with whom they interact. She examines the social dimensions of cross-cultural exchange in these four arenas (performance, village life, souvenirs, photography) to argue that cultural commodities are conceived of as singularities, a special category whose commodity status is downplayed in order to generate an increased sense of authenticity and to perpetuate the myth of a "primitive" economy and way of life more generally. In touristic encounters, experience itself is a sort of commodity, but relationships (real or imagined) are central to investing these experiences with meaning and value. This analysis contributes new understandings of the role and significance of authenticity in the anthropology of tourism, and its relationship to exchange; that is, how meaning and value are ascribed to the cultural products produced and consumed in the cultural tourism encounter with reference to ideas about what is and isn't authentic.