Vexed Relations: The Interplay of Culture, Race, and Sex

This chapter considers the work of three Caribbean writers Michelle Cliff, Oonya Kempadoo, and Christian Campbell, who grapple with the complexity of culture, race, and sex within the overwhelming context of neocolonial tourism and globalization. Cliff’s novel No Telephone to Heaven represents post-independence Jamaica from the 1960s to the 1980s during the rise of tourism as the model for development. The novel carefully exposes the exploitative cultural and sexual consumption of the Caribbean through representing the ways in which Jamaica and its people are packaged and sold in the film and tourist industries. Kempadoo’s novel’s Tide Running offers a seductive challenge to neocolonialism through a sharp critique of the sexual and cultural politics of tourism and the adverse effects of globalization on the island of Tobago. Through subtle and powerful metaphors, Campbell’s poems, “Groove” and “Welcome Centre” reveal the profound influence of tourism on Caribbean sexual and cultural identity, unsilencing the sexual/gendered aspects of tourist exploitation in the Bahamas.