To browse Academia. Tracing dialectical tropes of paradise across the "long modernity" of the capitalist world-system, Deckard reads literature from postcolonial nations in context with colonial discourse in order to demonstrate how paradise begins as a topos motivating European exploration and colonization, shifts into an ideological myth justifying imperial exploitation, and finally becomes a literary motif used by contemporary writers to critique neocolonial representations and conditions in the age of globalization.
Combining a range of critical perspectives-cultural materialist, ecocritical, and postcolonial-the volume opens up a deeper understanding of the relation between paradise discourse and the destructive dynamics of plantation, tourism, and global capital.
Deckard uncovers literature from East Africa and South Asia which has been previously overlooked in mainstream postcolonial criticism, and gestures to how the utopian dimensions of the paradise myth might be reclaimed to promote cultural resistance. The introductory chapter positions tourism as a neocolonial enterprise in which globalization and U. It argues that tourism is one of the most powerful conduits of neocolonialism not only because of economic and political reasons, but also because tourism drastically shapes the socio-cultural landscape of the region.
The chapter demonstrates the intersections among tourism and diaspora studies and issues of consumption, mobility, culture, sexuality, and sexual labor. Many critics of tourism are referenced in order to trace the legacy of slavery and colonialism found in the tourist industry, which emerges in economic, socio-political, cultural, and sexual terms. The analysis focuses on novels by Barry Unsworth and Amitav Ghosh.
Published in PMLA Course Description: In this course, we will travel through historical moments guided by the stories that map our worlds and our political imaginations. Our engagement in this space of encounter between Pacific and non- Pacific economic, political, and ideological forces and agendas focuses on the dynamic configurations of possession and repossession in the complex space of negotiation between Indigenous representations of place, for- eign investments in paradise, and the encroachment of global capitalism.
