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Essay on jamaica and colonialism
Essay on jamaica and colonialism
Effects of colonialism on the people of the Caribbean
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The quote room A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid describes the concept of being reveals the consequences of colonialism and globalization. Colonialism and Globalization result in the westerners inability to see the land as belonging to someone else, and seeing it as their source for pleasure and reconstruction.
The Westerner referring most commonly to those that are of European descent see the island of Jamaica, to be exotic, a place of wonder and discovery, which is why they decided to settle in hopes of exploring this unknown territory to find adventure just as Edward Said described in Latent and Manifest Orientalism. To this day modern westerners, tourists, have the same mentality that Said described when they travel to Jamaica, they see it as a place to of adventure, a vacation from the boredom and stress that they have experienced back home. What tourists do not realize is that they are able to experience this adventure at the expense of other people’s hard work and labor, which is the Natives daily life. These people may bask all day in what the tourist thinks they enjoy the...
Fluorescent turquoise waters, a vibrant city culture, as well as an unending supply of mimosas and sunburns within a resort, benefits the common wealthy couple looking for a swell time. When people imagine the Caribbean, they probably visualize the soft sands of the Spice Island Beach Resort. Many people see the Caribbean as relaxing paradise. What people don’t understand, are the years of history hidden behind the mask of many resorts. In the book entitled “Empire’s Crossroads: A History of the Caribbean from Columbus to the Present Day”, Author Carrie Gibson differentiates how people view the Caribbean nowadays, by altering their visualization with four-hundred pages of rich history and culture, that argues the ideology about the Caribbean
“Jamaica’s a country of great dichotomy. On the one hand you have a tourist industry with great beaches and resorts, but on the other you have such great poverty and the violence that goes along with that.”(Michael Franti) In this paper, I will talk about the geography, the history of Jamaica, the people that live there now and that lived there in the past, the lifestyle of the society, and the society, like the government and economy.
A lot of tourists would not think that they are offending the native residents when they travel. In the article, “The Ugly Tourist” excerpt from Jamaica Kincaid’s book, Small Place, she argues that when one is in a state of being a tourist, one does not know the depth of the place and only sees what one wants to see. Kincaid gives a strong idea of what she is arguing when she described a tourist as “an ugly human being.” She presents the emotional conflicts between tourist and the natives by evaluating their different lifestyles.
Steven Gregory’s book entitled The Devil Behind The Mirror is an ethnographical study of the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic is in the Caribbean, it occupies the Western half of an island, while Haiti makes up the Eastern portion. Gregory attempts to study and analyze the political, social and cultural aspects of this nation by interviewing and observing both the tourists and locals of two towns Boca Chica and Andres. Gregory’s research centers on globalization and the transnational processes which affect the political and socio-economics of the Dominican Republic. He focuses on the social culture, gender roles, economy, individual and nation identity, also authority and power relations. Several of the major relevant issues facing Dominican society include racism, sexism, and discrimination, economy of resort tourism, sex tourism and the informal economy. The objective of Gregory’s ethnographic research is to decipher exclusionary practices incorporated by resort tourism, how it has affected locals by division of class, gender, and race, increasing poverty and reliance on an informal economy.
Antigua was a small place. A beautiful island that gets a lot of tourist’s attention. These tourists effects Antiguans in so many ways. In small place, Jamaica Kincaid explained the effects of tourism and colonialism of English people on Antigua and how they affect the culture and education of Antiguans. This book “it is often seen as a highly personal history of her home on the island of Antigua” (Berman).
Since 1840 the Hawaiian Islands have been an escape to a tropical paradise for millions of tourists. People all over the world encounter alluring, romanticized pictures of Hawai'i's lush, tropical vegetation, exotic animals, beautiful beaches, crystal clear water, and fantastical women. This is the Hawai'i tourists know. This is the Hawai’i they visit. However, this Hawai'i is a state of mind, a corporate-produced image existing on the surface. More precisely, it is an aftermath of relentless colonization of the islands' native inhabitants by the United States. These native Hawaiians experience a completely different Hawai'i from the paradise tourists enjoy. No one makes this as clear as Haunani-Kay Trask, a native Hawaiian author. In her book, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai'i and through her poetry in Light in the Crevice Never Seen, Trask provides an intimate account of the tourist industry's impact on native Hawaiian culture. She presents a negative perspective of the violence, pollution, commercial development, and cultural exploitation produced by the tourist industry. Trask unveils the cruel reality of suffering and struggling through a native Hawaiian discourse. Most of the world is unaware of this.
Hawaii is a top vacation destination by many tourists all over the world. When Hawaii comes to mind many people and different cultures imagine sandy beaches, warm, blue waters, lush green backdrops, Hula dancers in grass skirts with flowers in their hair and leis around their necks. These visual representations are iconic symbols of Hawaii and of what many have come to define as Hawaiian. These images and ideas painted by the visitor industry most often take place at the expense of the Hawaiians historic culture. These stereotypes conjured up by the tourist indus...
In part fictional and part autobiographical novel “A Small Place” published in 1988, Jamaica Kincaid offers a commentary on how the tenets of white superiority and ignorance seem to emerge naturally from white tourists. She establishes this by using the nameless “you” depicted in the story to elucidate the thoughts they have when visiting such formerly colonized islands. This inner mentality of the white tourists reveals how tourism is still a form of oppression for the natives of such formerly colonized tourists as it continues to exploit them. I will be focusing primarily on page 10 of the text to illustrate this.
A major theme in Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We is collectivity, the state of being collected into one. Both texts are notable examples of such and show the different types of collectiveness as the point of view shifts from tourist to native, rationalist to anti-rationalist. In A Small Place, Antigua’s identity as a nation varies when observed from two different perspectives. Tourists view Antigua as a utopic resort that serves as an escape from the dullness of a routinely life. However, because a tourist’s beautifying gaze distorts the reality the Antiguans have to face, their view greatly differs from an Antiguan’s view. Due to Britain’s colonization of Antigua for over 350 years, the residual effects of their domination evidently leave the Antiguans economically powerless, though many fail to realize they are spiritually powerless as well. Under Kincaid’s scrutiny, which has insight into both a tourist’s and a native’s perspective, she demystifies the fog that prevents tourists from viewing Antigua as anything more than a resort. Similarly, One State’s demand for uniform belief in rationality acts as a cognitive prison in which individuality and imagination are not allowed. The protagonist, initially the model citizen as he is the chief builder of the Integral whose purpose is to spread rationality like a religion, is able to escape from that prison occasionally. His vacillation between freedom and the confines of the One State are illustrated through his personal journal entries as two contrasting perspectives become clear: the belief in rationality and the opposition of the coercive rationalism. In both Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, the authors use collectivity as a tool...
...xtent will this essay bring about a change in Antigua? The Antiguan scene can only be modified by the government choosing to run the country in a more manner that will benefit everyone associated with Antigua, especially its natives. The native’s behaviours are related to their jealousy of tourists, and of the tourist’s ability to escape their own hometown to take a vacation. While a tourist can relate to the idea that the exhaustion felt after a vacation comes from dealing with the invisible animosity in the air between the natives and themselves, having this knowledge is almost as good as not having it, because there is nothing that the tourist, or the reader, can really DO about it! If Kincaid’s purpose is solely to make tourists aware of their actions, she has succeeded. If Kincaid’s purpose is to help Antigua, she may not have succeeded to the same magnitude.
societies to reexamine their view of the Caribbean. In this paper the following topics in The
This idea stems from the whiteness of the volunteers and development workers, the prominence of which has attracted extensive attention and criticism (Conran 2011, 1464). The popularity of volunteer tourism among privileged white individuals who are “participants in [the] wealthy capitalist society” (Greenberg 2008, 284) that is the West has garnered criticism that volunteer tourism is, ultimately, a “new form of colonialism” (Conran 2011, 1464). The idea and presence of the ‘white saviour’ “evokes the legacy of the colonial past of the West” (Chouliaraki 2010, 111). Furthermore, in combination with the volunteer tourist’s lack of knowledge of the political and social context of the host community, as mentioned previously, the presence of the ‘white saviour’ serves to “promote a lifestyle of cultural and material values that may be inappropriate” (McLennan 2014, 165) to the host community. As a result, the poverty and inequality that the volunteer tourists seek to dismantle is instead reinforced through both their presence and the beliefs that they hold. Therefore, on a cultural and social level, the presence of the privileged white individual in the Global South causes more harm than it does
12 Nov. 2013. Brooks, Sheer. “’A Squatter in My Own Country!’ Spatial Manifestations of Social Exclusion in a Jamaican Tourist Resort Town.” New Perspectives in Caribbean. Tourism.
Colonial Mentality theory grounds this study in recognition of colonialism’s lingering impact. Colonial Mentality theory attempts to shift the dominant ways in which people perceive the world (Young, 2003). Young (2003) stated, “Colonialism claims the right of all people on this earth to the same material and cultural well-being” (p.2). Young (2003) asserted that colonialism “names a politics and a philosophy of activism” that challenges the pervasive inequality in the world. In a different way, it resumes anti-colonial struggles of the past. Historically, American powers, deemed the west, subjected many regions, the non-west, to colonial and imperial rule. American powers felt it was their duty to colonize and felt justified in doing so: Colonial
Colonialism was a concept of superiority of one territory over another; it was a concept that originated centuries ago. Colonialism had been put into action throughout a long line of history and did not end after World War II in 1945. Even with resistance and efforts from independent states after the war, colonialism did not disappear and continued as a dominant system. It remained and changed its form, resulted in the process of globalization, which continued to control over newly independent states following World War II. Globalization, a form of colonialism, maintained power for the system over states or regions through economic terms with the development of the World Bank, and its derivation of structural adjustments. This financial institution was formed and contributed to colonialism; it assisted in the economic affairs of colonized nation(s). Along with class, professor Manfred B. Steger's book, Globalization: A Very Short Introduction, and I.B. Logan and Kidane Mengisteab's article, "IMF – World Bank Adjustment and Structural Transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa," discussed the indirect rule of colonial powers through globalization.