In a postcolonial Caribbean, one of our greatest challenges may be the construction of identity as a direct counter to the psychological impact of colonialism and slavery. That is, who and what are we in the world today? That the identity of the Caribbean has for so long lay solely in the value of what can be extracted or experienced through us is a farce; a pervasive and persistent belief rooted in oppression. It goes without saying that the Caribbean represents much more than a vacation destination or the accessible exotic, though this is how we have come to be framed, and worse yet, how we often come to frame ourselves.
In this work, it is almost impossible to avoid material created for and by the mechanisms of imperialism, though their inclusion to any archive is worthy of critical examination. Looking is not a neutral activity. Through observation, we engage in a shared experience, with the viewer, the object and the creator as active, though unequal, parties. The object is particularly vulnerable, the lone participant upon whom narratives may be projected most directly. A singular narrative, projected many times over, becomes a construct. As Chimamanda Adichie so beautifully articulates in her 2009 Ted Talk, The Danger of a Single story,
"It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power...Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person."
In our tribal past, group cohesion was crucially important to survival. We needed to be part of a close-knit tribe who could be counted on to look out for us, in exchange for knowing that we would do the same for them. As a result, there’s a powerful evolutionary drive to identify in some way with a tribe of people who are “like you”. The process of othering is the process by which an individual or group becomes mentally classified in somebody’s mind as “NOT like us”.
Rather than always remembering that every person is a complex bundle of emotions, ideas, motivations, reflexes, priorities, and many other subtle aspects, othering allows us to dismiss them as being in some way less human, and less worthy of respect and dignity, than we are.
The stories we tell and live, are not about facts but our values, fears and hopes – all of which, to a certain degree, are malleable. That malleability is the power that marketing and propaganda holds dear. The establishment of whole industries dependent on othering is as closely tied to the slave based economies of the Caribbean as it is to modern day tourism, but with a twist.
Tourism and the material that supports it is particularly dangerous not only because it centers around an economic activity but because it centers the tourist at all times, even in spaces where they could and would be the other themselves.
The success of any tourism campaign depends on one group’s perceived comfort over the other; one group’s perceived control over the unknown. For an industry actively selling the in unknown, it is imperative to also sell power. The story that is told through this particular propaganda is that of the agreeable and accessible other; a variation of ourselves familiar enough to be comfortable among, but different enough to feel superiority over. Even in their own space, the Caribbean and the people who reside there are rendered powerless, becoming not just objects of fascination but in perpetual service to their visitors.
That fiction, told over and over becomes indistinguishable from fact, even for Caribbean people themselves. The work lies in believing ourselves to be more.