Fanon, Freedom of Assembly, and the Right to Protest in the Contemporary Caribbean

The national bourgeoisie organizes centers of rest and relaxation and pleasure resorts to meet the wishes of the Western bourgeoisie. Such activity is given the name of tourism, and for the occasion will be built up as a national industry.

—Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Written fifty plus years ago—and well before the heyday of the tourism sector’s global expansion—Frantz Fanon’s oft-cited passage, above, captures the material conditions under which soon-to-be independent colonies would be compelled to turn to this emerging industry as a source of their future economic development. Fanon identifies a number of the potential drawbacks of the sector including the asymmetries of power between former colonies and their colonizers; the implicit intervention of global capital; and the impending adverse social, cultural and political effects on the formation of the post-independent state, concluding that:

Because it is bereft of ideas, because it lives to itself, and cuts itself off from the people, undermined by its hereditary incapacity to think in terms of all the problems of the nation as seen from the point of view of the whole of that nation, the national middle class will have nothing better to do than to take on the role of manager for Western enterprise, and it will in practice set up its country as a brothel of Europe.

(Fanon 1963, 153–54, emphasis added)

Scholars and critics have rightly identified the “prostitution” of both country and people Fanon suggests here as more than just rhetorical exaggeration (e.g., Turner and Ash 1975; Crick 2002; Wilson 2008). Fanon’s prescient assessment—albeit a cursory one—has triggered a substantial body of literature on the socio-economic impact of the tourism sector including “ecological deterioration, profit leakage, social displacement, distorted cultural patterns, rising land values, drugs, and prostitution” (Cabezas 2008, 22). Much of the literature, however, has missed a crucial point when Fanon describes the middle class as being incapable of thinking “in terms of all the problems of the nation as seen from the point of view of the whole of that nation.” In other words, the relationship existing between tourist-generating and tourist-destination countries—in the language of contemporary national ministries of tourism—often denies the economic inequality at the core of the tourism industry.

Fanon suggests a critical posture that privileges the idea of the integrated nature of the system of underdevelopment which conjoins politics, economics, and the social in what he envisions to be treatments of the problems of the whole of the nation. More precisely, Fanon challenges us to take a closer look at the underlying political economic structure of the nation in order to trace tourism’s tacit participation in and continuation of the systematic and integrated processes of underdevelopment inaugurated in the Caribbean region under colonialism. The remainder of this paper offers a sustained reflection on Fanon’s critical posture of thinking “all the problems of the nation” from the vantage point of the Post-independence Bahamas, a leader in the Caribbean region’s tourism sector. I will offer an interpretation of the sale of one of the most exclusive Bahamian resort properties—the renowned One & Only Ocean Club—as a case study of tourism’s relationship to Bahamian land, land ownership, and land access on the one hand, and to notions of Bahamian citizenship, citizenship rights, and belonging, on the other hand.

On June 5, 2014, in a joint statement, Access Industries and Brookfield Asset Management—the majority stakeholder of Kerzner International Holding Limited—announced that Access Industries had acquired the renowned One & Only Ocean Club on Paradise Island in the Bahamas from Brookfield Asset Management and its institutional partners. Kerzner International—the original developer of the property—would continue to manage it under the award winning One & Only brand. Described as a “landmark resort in the Caribbean, the 105 room One & Only Ocean Club sits high on a prime 36-acre beachfront site overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.” Len Blavatnik, Chairman and founder of Access Industries, said of the acquisition: “The...