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Abstract
This article discusses Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, a work of creative non-fiction, and Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven, a semi-autobiographical novel, as texts which offer a peripheral perspective of global modernity – one informed by the poverty, oppression and colonial history underwriting the development of commercial tourism in the Caribbean-to the dominant narrative produced by the tourism industry. It argues that this perspectival conflict emerges from, and feeds into, what Henri Lefebvre notes is a struggle for (and against) the transformation of the “concrete” space of everyday lived experience into an “abstract space”, a homogenous, commodified, and ahistorical space produced to facilitate the accumulation of wealth. By pointing to overlapping and discrepant spatial practices, this article contends that Kincaid and Cliff disrupt the tourism industry’s construction of Antigua and Jamaica as locations isolated from historical and social processes.
Notes
1. Scholars have been unable to agree on A Small Place’s classification; it has been described as “counter travel writing” (Holland and Huggan Citation2000, 21), a “novel” (Strachan Citation2004, 228), an “autobiographically inflected essay” (Loh Citation2013, 178), etc. While critics categorize No Telephone to Heaven as a “semi-autobiographical novel” (Smith Citation2008, 141), A Small Place’s form continues to evade critical consensus.
2. It is worth noting that the peripheral perspective of global modernity these two texts offer is one of the late 1980s but is, nevertheless, relevant still today.
3. In contradistinction to the tourism industry favouring an ahistorical and sanitized version of Jamaica, in our contemporary moment the tourism industry profits from locals performing Jamaica history, rather than obfuscating it, by, for example, dressing in period costumes and simulating working on plantations (while contradictorily working for the tourism industry which can be considered a continuation of colonial relations by serving global interests in a local place).
4. Following the “Third World”, the term “Global South” emerged in the 1970s as a way to “describe societies that seemed to face difficulties in achieving the economic and political goals of either capitalist or socialist modernity” and was popularized in the 1980s by the Brandt Commission, which “advocated large infusions of capital from the North to the South to enable their modernization” (Dirlik Citation2007, 13). With the disappearance of the socialist alternative with the end of the Cold War and the emergence of one hegemonic power and ideology (neo-liberalism), this, according to Arif Dirlik, has “increased the burden on the South [ … ] in the problems it faces” (13). The Global South’s increasingly crucial role in global politics (post-Cold War) not only renders the term more salient in our contemporary moment than at the time of A Small Place and No Telephone to Heaven’s publication since neo-liberal globalization has only intensified global inequalities, but also accounts for the term gaining momentum in the last decade.
5. Although an opposing tourism trend must also be acknowledged, as it is becoming increasingly popular with western tourists, which capitalizes precisely on the presence (rather than absence) of the locals by marketing “authenticity” rather than sheltered beaches, A Small Place presents a tourism industry geared towards an Antigua emptied of locals and history.
6. This phenomenon also occurs in many western seaside spaces – such as the French Riviera, for example, which is replete with private beaches, so that locals and poorer tourists are more or less “evicted” from long stretches of the Mediterranean in favour of wealthy tourists. This is a sign of uneven development within western societies themselves.
7. Dis-embedding, a term coined by Antony Giddens (Citation1990), here refers to the way in which the material reality of Jamaica can no longer be understood by its grounding in (i.e. by being firmly fixed within) its local context, as the island has been sanitized and thus removed from the immediate context of poverty (i.e. the women hunting for food) to produce a space desirable for tourists.
8. It is worth noting that, at times, Kincaid employs an angry performative rhetoric to point to the inequalities engendered by the development of the tourism industry in Antigua while Cliff, working within the genre of fiction, speaks of the devastating effects of these external interventions in Jamaica through various characters.