ABSTRACT
O n Antigua, tourism is about beaches, fine white strands m et by gentle blue warm seas; little in the way of nightlife, adventuring, wild areas, or historic sites draws tourists’ attention away from the sensual and playful experience of the tropical beach. But as Jamaica Kincaid lets us know about the Caribbean landscape ideal, Antiguan beach landscapes, like other touristed landscapes, are characterized by a certain dissonance between the visible and the invisible, the unexamined and the manifest. Apparently natural, they are products of social relations at work in the context of ecological and physical processes-including a local political economy of sand mining. Antiguan beaches are also contested landscapes, especially sites along the island’s Caribbean shore where domestic and international tourism development conflict w ith local ideas about land use and place. This chapter examines processes of tourism development on Antigua through conflicts over coastal land use and changing geographies of tourism , which have increasingly targeted mangrove wetlands and historic subsistence lands as sites for new resort development. The analysis begins by examining the w ider social processes that have contributed to the Caribbean becoming a tourist destination, and then turns to focus on the particular spatial processes at work in Antigua and its contested landscapes, as produced by the state, local elites, foreign developers, and Antiguan residents. In the final section I examine the discursive and material practices of various actors in conflict over a nascent reso rt
development, the Asian Village Resort, and how the conflict ‘inter-acts’ with cultural constructs of Antiguan ‘selves’ and the debate over appropriate use of Antiguan coasts.
