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82  Chapter 5 Promotional Presentations anD the selling of the natiVe The Queen Represents With the new shape of queen in the territory, the emphasis suddenly shifted to representation, and young women were expected to stand for “not just the festival but . . . our community.”1 Yet to stand for is not the same as to be, so representing the women in the community required the construction of a fiction—consistently and coincidentally the job of tourism—to identify and create cultural “appetizers,” that gesture toward something distinct/Caribbean/woman/different that could be easily identified, consumed, and understood. The promotional presentations and introductory speeches by the contestants in the 1999 Miss u.S. Virgin islands pageant demonstrate the role of tourism in the Virgin islands imaginary—identifying the “island woman” and the challenges that further an even larger attempt by islanders to define the native. in this chapter, i argue that pageants incorporate tourism’s project of identifying all things Caribbean in general and all things “native” to the Virgin islands in particular. On the one hand, pageant culture legitimizes the productions, while on the other it creates an ambassadorial, albeit fictional, place within the political machinery for the young female participants. i examine the public’s ambivalence toward this identity articulation and the machinations that accompany being “native,” using Miss u.S. Virgin islands pageant introductory speeches to demonstrate individual attempts at identifying the Virgin islands’ people. as with the narration of the pageant performance in chapter 4, i present the promotional presentations as they were performed that evening, with minor stage commentary based on my observations as a performer and performance analyst. The audience members’ responses betrayed the ways in which they could imagine themselves defined and the local cultures circulating The Selling of the Native 83 in new economies. This chapter links pageantry and legislative policy in local discourse on national identity. by constructing the fictional relationship between tourism and the Miss u.S. Virgin islands pageant, participating islanders rehearse for each other representation and ideas regarding nation. These performances not only prove to locals their modern status as they enter contests performed the world over but also keep the community engaged in discourses regarding authority, their relation to it, and the ways in which this pageant assists them in determining their values, visions, and means of communicating those concerns to one another.2 What impresses audiences in these performances, what the contestants choose to include or exclude in their presentation of themselves , offers readings of linguistic discourse. in other words, what they say and how they say it betrays many Virgin islanders’ values regarding their political and social positions and how they see themselves as able or unable to move between economies and populations—in short, the everyday negotiations of their world. at the moment of tourism’s explosion after the 1950s, Virgin islands’ women were unwittingly put to work for the nation, set up to embody what it meant to be a Caribbean woman and represent her on stage. The process created a set of disturbing questions that continue to surface periodically on the contest stage as young women grapple with speeches designed to encapsulate themselves and a composite island woman. Who is the Virgin islands woman? What are her attributes ? What does she look like? How does she speak? How does she move? What does she do? While the subtext of these questions might delimit the diversity of Caribbean women, they are asked to consider these confining concepts in negotiating this area of representation. Shaped by pageant organizers and the values expressed within the limits of the contests, they are consistently operating on dual levels, identifying their private selves and their community, which might differ substantially for each contestant. The product of their work is offered up as fodder for the territory as a whole and as service to self and country. The ostensibly natural outgrowth of this new role of the young contest winner as representative of young island women was a relationship with the burgeoning tourism industry. but there was no natural relationship; rather, one was created. Claire roker approached tourism officials after an early contest and asked them to make Miss St. Croix the island’s ambassador. More specifically, roker suggested, “Once this young lady is totally groomed and understands what her role is, anything pertaining to tourism she should be involved in.” according to roker, her task was complicated by the fact that “back in those days, you had to...

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