Paradise from the other side of nowhere: troubling a troubled scene of tourist encounter in Belize

Abstract

When Shaky was run over by a drunken tourist one night in April of 2003 on the main street of Placencia, one of several coastal ‘tourist paradises’ in Belize, the image and stories of his mangled body stimulated a flow of narrative that conjured a nervous dread troubling the smooth, laid-back, tropical vibe of the place. In such a moment of shock and impact, images of a Caribbean dream-world suddenly enter the senses like a nightmare to agitate things. This paper tracks the affective forces of Shaky's death as an arresting image and the troubling state of suspense and suspension that still haunts the place and its people. It explores how the stories of a ‘death in paradise’ focused anxieties and wild speculations about tourist encounters. This paper is about the local public pulse of things in moments of impact and of the generative potential lodged in fashioning life in a space of tourist encounter.

Keywords:

• touristic encounters
• affect
• performance
• spectacle
• tourism and the body
• Belize as tourist state

Notes

For more on the debate on televisual culture, nation building, and the rise of a moral discourse concerning local Belizeans getting ‘hooked up’ see Wilk (1993, 1994, 2002).

An ongoing radio and television advertising campaign has made Belizeans aware of their connections to the tourism industry and the future of tourism in their lives. Each segment ends with the phrase: ‘Tourism is for you, tourism is for me, tourism is for all of us. It is our future, get involved’. Today, the advertising statistics boast that a quarter of working Belizeans are directly involved in tourism.

The idea of assemblage comes from Deleuze and Guattari's (2007/1987). An assemblage is made up of discursive (acts and statements) and non-discursive (bodies, actions, and passions) elements that combine in a manner familiar to Foucault's dispositifs of power/knowledge/desire, and by the nature of movement governing their operation (territories, fields of interiority, and lines of deterritorialization). An assemblage may be extensive, systematic, and quantitative in character (i.e. it can be totalized, divided, and organized without changing in nature) and thus resemble a line of being, an identity, or a fixity (what Deleuze and Gauttari call ‘molar’ entities); or it can be intensive and occur as ‘virtual multiplicities of pure duration’ (a difference in kind, a continuous multiplicity that cannot be reduced to numbers, system, and concept, the ‘molecular’). Assemblages are defined by lines of flight, immanent forms of creativity, and movement (deterritorialization) and when such movements are ‘captured’ in processes of reterritorialization to constitute new territories (Deleuze & Guattari, 2007, pp. 88–91). The point about assemblages is that they make possible the process of thinking through the processes of such productions as stable identities, territories, and structures to show how they are actually secondary formations upon a primary process of ‘becoming-other’.