Confronting Myths of Exceptional, Black Leisure Travel: Teaching June Jordan’s “Report from the Bahamas” in the Contemporary Classroom

This article demonstrates the pedagogical value of teaching June Jordan’s essay “Report from the Bahamas” (1982) alongside “It’s Better in the Bahamas” tourism advertisements from Essence magazine to critique narratives of exceptional, Black American travel in the contemporary classroom. Whereas contemporary discourses on Black American leisure travel characterize Black American leisure mobility as a mode of resistance to US racism and surveillance, Jordan’s essay asks readers to consider whose immobility and containment, via imperial structures, makes Black American leisure possible. The article outlines an assignment wherein students must create advertisements that resist the Caribbean as paradise trope using Jordan’s essay and highlights some of the students’ responses to the assignment.