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Chapter 3 “Nature’s Little Secrets” Marketing Paradise and Making Nation When I started my formal research in the BVI in 1990, I was guided by the question,“What is a BritishVirgin Islander?”As the discussions in chapters 1 and 2 suggest, this is a timely question. The BVI has a longstanding and complex relation to Great Britain as well as to the U.S. Virgin Islands and to other Caribbean countries. Likewise, when I began my research the BVI had only recently developed a stable economy and institutions that involve BVIslanders directly in their own governance. As the BVI population grows and diversifies. so that fewer than half of BVI residents are native BVIslanders, the question “What is a British Virgin Islander” is also one that BVIslanders ask themselves with increasing frequency. Indeed, as I suggested in chapter 1, the constitutional reforms that led to the 2007 rati- fication of a new BVI constitution were in no small part stimulated by just such a question. In this chapter, I begin to address the question, “What is a British Virgin Islander?” through an analysis of the ways that the BVI is depicted in tourism representations. Following directions taken in postcolonial studies, I consider images and narratives that originate in the West about non-Western locales and people as constructions embedded in very particular histories and power relations and supporting Western superiority and hegemony (Bhabha 1990; Said 1994; Spivak 1987). However, as Krista A. Thompson (2006) points out in her study of photography and tourism in colonial Jamaica and the Bahamas, analyses of the ideological underpinnings of representations tend to reveal more about the West than about the people and places being represented. Thus, I am also interested in looking at the ways that images and narratives that are used to market the BVI as a tourist destination are also used locally, and particularly in the project to constitute a BVI national identity.Thompson undertakes a related project, exploring how tourism’s representations of Jamaica and the Bahamas were given concrete form in the physical environments of those islands, shaping “the physical contours of the very ‘social spaces’ that they ‘imagined’” (2006: 71 Take Me to My Paradise 72 11). As we saw in the previous chapter, idealized images of the BVI can affect considerations of the physical look and feel of the BVI, particularly with regard to the perceived impact of cruise-ship tourism upon the elite tourism market. In this chapter, I also consider how narratives and images that are used to sell the BVI as a tourist destination intertwine with images and discourses that ground assertions of a natural BVI motherland. I first visited Tortola in December 1977. I was a tourist, in the BVI with my boyfriend (now my husband) for a five-day learn-to-cruise course, followed by a week of bareboating. I don’t remember much about that first trip. But a field note that I wrote in 2001 about the sounds that I heard from the apartment where I was living references that first visit, and suggests that I, like most tourists, was captivated by what I took to be true paradise. [Field notes 8.6.2001] The apartment I stay in when I am here is on a hillside overlooking Cane Garden Bay. Two nights ago, the Saturday of Bomba’s Full Moon Party, I counted 75 boats in the turquoise waters of the perfect half moon shaped bay below. I first sailed into Cane Garden Bay in 1977, and the night we dropped anchor ours was the only boat in the bay. My most distinct memory from that night is of music. We sat on the deck of the sailboat and listened as steel band music carried across the water from Stanley’s Welcome Bar. It was “Yellow Bird.” The stars were bright, the music, combined with the lapping of water against the hull and the occasional clank of the halyard against the mast, made it a perfect paradise memory. The music that drifted across the water to us then was steel pan. The music I hear at night from my verandah far up the hillside is more likely to be reggae from Quito’s or the bass-heavy soca beat from Myette’s a bit further down the beach. I have been in homes much further up the hill from where I am situated and have been struck by how well the sound carries—indeed, the “noise” from the...

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