Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture

Tourists flock to the Caribbean for its beaches, an influx which has deeply affected the culture of the islands. Resisting Paradise explores the import of both tourism and diaspora in shaping Caribbean identity. It examines Caribbean writers and others who confront the region’s overdependence on the tourist industry and address the many ways that tourism continues the legacy of colonialism.

Angelique V. Nixon explores the relationship between culture and sex within the production of “paradise” and investigates the ways in which Caribbean writers, artists, and activists respond to and powerfully resist this production. Forms of resistance include critiquing exploitation, challenging dominant historical narratives, exposing tourism’s influence on cultural and sexual identity in the Caribbean and its diaspora, and offering alternative models of tourism and travel.

Resisting Paradise places emphasis on Caribbean people as travelers and as cultural workers who contribute to alternative understandings of tourism in the Caribbean. Through a unique multidisciplinary approach to comparative literary analysis, interviews, and participant observation, Nixon analyzes the ways Caribbean cultural producers are taking control of representation. While focused mainly on the Anglophone Caribbean, the study covers a range of territories including Antigua, the Bahamas, Grenada, Haiti, Jamaica, as well as Trinidad and Tobago.

Nixon utilizes transnational feminist postcolonialism to explain “resisting paradise” and the sexual-cultural politics of tourism. With gender and sexuality at the center of her inquiry and analysis, she grapples with the dominant role of tourism in Caribbean life.