“Monument to Rottenness”: Postcolonial Enclave Tourism in Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place

Abstract

Postcolonial criticism has recently recovered tourism from the margins of postcolonial studies. This paper aims to contribute to the postcolonial discourse on island tourism by exploring Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place (1988) as a discursive subversion of a tourism industry centered on the exclusion of local agency and history. Framed in postcolonial theory, the study focuses on enclave tourism as an unsustainable economy based on tourist/host division. It draws on Edensor’s (2000, 2001) and Carrigan’s (2010a, 2010b) conceptualizations of enclave tourism. Kincaid’s representation of postcolonial Antigua reveals the complicity of colonial legacy with unsustainable tourism development. Sites of ruins and decline become tourist attractions and monuments to rottenness, signifying the dispossession of the local Antiguans and the erasure of their culture. The study reveals how tourist enclaves, as represented in Kincaid’s travel narrative, do not only produce a divided and contrived space but also limit the tourist experience of the real Antigua.