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Chapter 6 Stanley’s Swing and Other Intimate Encounters Tourists preparing for a vacation to the BVI have multiple resources available to assist them in their pretravel speculation and fantasy. Travel guides, Web sites, information from friends who have visited, and tourism brochures put out by the BVI Tourist Board and tourist businesses all help travelers to the BVI create an emotional and psychic template for their vacation. Studies of tourism brochures (Dann 1996; Selwyn 1993, 1996;Wildman 2004) suggest that regardless of what tourist destination they treat, tourism brochures generally can be read from one of two general perspectives. On one hand, they present images and texts that invite travelers to “step back in time into a pre-modern paradise where, free from the pressures of modern life, they can relax, unwind, and rediscover themselves” (Wildman 2004: 3).This is exemplified in a BVI advertisement that, inviting the tourist to “lose yourself,” is actually an invitation to selfdiscovery . As we have seen, depictions of the BVI as a pristine premodern paradise predominate in everything from travel guides to Tourist Board brochures, lending credence to tourism scholar Gavan Titley’s claim that the defining role in the global economy of all the islands of the Eastern Caribbean is “that of pre-modern touristic construct” (2001: 80). In either case, the tourist to the BVI travels with precise fantasies and expectations, constructed through travel brochures and travel guides and grounded in a very particular Western episteme. Tourist brochures can also be read from a more postmodern perspective, presenting the world as a smorgasbord, “the gathering together of everything from sites to emotions to persons, into a cash nexus” (Wildman 2004: 3).This is exemplified in another BVI ad, for a Pusser’s restaurant onVirgin Gorda. In contrast to BVI ads depicting a solitary sailboat in a quiet cove or a pristine white-sand beach, this ad pictures a beach on which many people are engaged in many different activities. The narrative that accompanies this picture offers vacationers a range of activities—exploring coral reefs, swimming and picnicking on uninhabited white sand beaches, sailing, water 147 Take Me to My Paradise 148 skiing, snorkeling, scuba diving, playing tennis, fishing, playing volleyball, dining, drinking, or just lazing in the sun—in “a millionaire’s playground that you can afford.” The important point in the case of either reading is that regardless of the approach taken by tourist brochures to sell a destination , “they are increasingly presenting a world that is far removed from the realities of everyday life” (Wildman 2004: 3). And to enter this world is to enter a space, to borrow a phrase that has been used to characterize filmmaker Maya Deren’s fascination with possession rituals, of the erotic mystery of the self (Sitney 1979: 11, cited in Russell 1999: 207). In this chapter, I explore the psychic and emotional dimension of BVI tourists’ quests, by looking at their practices in specific BVI tourist locales. I pay particular attention to the allure of discovery that BVI tourism publications promote, and argue that as BVI tourists seek to know an undiscovered premodern place, they also seek access to an authentic unmediated self. Simultaneously, I reflect on how tourists’ expectations and quests affect the lives of BVIslanders, as they, too, negotiate their identities in a mobile and intricate world. I begin with observations of one of the BVI’s most popular tourist spots, Stanley’s Welcome Bar in Cane Garden Bay, on the island of Tortola. [Field notes 8.18.1997] Sitting at Cane Garden Bay in the late afternoon I watch as a taxi man brings a white tourist couple out onto the beach. They don’t appear to be planning to stay long, for they have no beach towels, no coolers. No bathing suits even; just shorts and sandals and tee-shirts. They walk past a group of local women who are sitting under the shade by Stanley ’s Welcome Bar watching their children swim. “My God!” the man exclaims, “everything is changed; I can’t believe how much has changed in the last 12 years.” “O.K.,” I say to myself, “he’s made the ‘I am in the know therefore I control’ move.” This is such a familiar move on the part of tourists who come to Stanley’s that I don’t even trouble myself to reach the 10 inches to my bag where my notebook sits. Too hot. The tourists and the taxi man go down...

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