ABSTRACT
This desire, and the way of realizing it, issued from the dynamics of a heterogeneous society of many ethnic groups, with competing values and cultures, and the need for the small White minority to assert their cultural hegemony. Today in Trinidad, the circumstances have changed: the foreign visitor can no longer avoid local colour, and is not encouraged to, but the politics of perception remains the same. Though the status of the competing groups has shifted, the battle being fought, sometimes under the misleading rubric of “tourist promotion,” has not altered: the promotion of a particular type of knowledge about Trinidad, a desire that Trinidad be known in a particular way, ostensibly to validate the “Creole”1 postindependence national culture.
