ABSTRACT
The Tropics have long been metaphorically consumed through colonial and imperial travel narratives, fictions, and artistic depictions of far-away places, lush landscapes and exotic others. Yet the Caribbean occupies an ambiguous place in the realm of Western imagined geographies, partaking of the paranoid fantasies of discovery that Anne McClintock identifies as ‘both a poetics of ambivalence and a politics of violence’ (McClintock 1995: 28). Euro-American understandings of the Caribbean pivot around what Silvia Spitta, following Edmundo Desnoes, has described as ‘a single Manichean political, economic and discursive opposition which was repeated ad nauseam. This opposition, paradise/hell, noble savages/ cannibals, has persisted to this day, but now it reads: friendly natives/hostile guerrillas’ (Spitta 1997: 160). The interplay of these two discourses in the consumption of the Caribbean creates a sense of excitement and danger, produced through moving closer and distancing, longing and horror, touch and recoil. It is both the site of escapist tourism and the dangerous terrain of criminals, unstable governments, disease, and desperate boat-people. As one recent travel writer ambivalently describes it: ‘The first time I went to Jamaica, I didn’t know much about the place beyond a vague impression of pirates, palm trees, Noel Coward, ganja and beneath that a sense of intensity, a lurking voluptuous danger.’1
