Caribbean Inhospitality
The Poetics of Strangers at Home
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Rutgers University Press
Publishing:14th Feb '25
£22.99
This title is due to be published on 14th February, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
The Caribbean has a global reputation for extending unparalleled hospitality to foreign guests. Yet local citizens express feeling alienated from the Caribbean nations they call home. Here, Natalie Lauren Belisle probes the relationship between these incompatible narratives of Caribbean life. Departing from tourist-centered critiques of the Caribbean’s visitor economy, Belisle instead gives primacy to the political life of the Caribbean citizen-subject within a broader hospitality regime. Reading literary, cinematic, and digital texts that traverse the Spanish, Anglophone, and Francophone Caribbean, Belisle interprets citizens’ estrangement through misdirected political deliberation and demonstrates that inhospitality is institutionalized through the aesthetic, reproducing itself in the laws that condition belonging and membership in the nation/state. Ultimately, Caribbean Inhospitality recasts the decay of nation/state sovereignty in the postcolonial Caribbean within the contours of neoliberalism, international relations, and cosmopolitanism.
"In her deeply perceptive, critically adroit study, Belisle reexamines the Caribbean’s long-standing image as a place of hospitality, arguing that the region is constituted as welcoming for the visitor even as its nations deny those conditions to their own citizens. Through a brilliant, broad-reaching analysis, she shows how this inhospitality registers as an aesthetic dimension, making visible forms of displacement that unsettle the meaning of home for Caribbean subjects. A key text for understanding the Caribbean’s paradoxical position in our current moment." -- Emily A. Maguire * author of Tropical Time Machines: Science Fiction in the Contemporary Hispanic Caribbean *
"By doing a critical reading of the dynamics of tourist economies and displacement, local vs. international, in literary, cultural, performative, and philosophical texts, Natalie Belisle offers an insightful look at the disputes between home, citizen, art, and space that define 'uninhabitable hospitality' in contemporary Caribbean societies. A tour de force and a great contribution to the study of agency and the redemptive power of art and the human in postcolonial and neoliberal Caribbean spaces." -- Jossianna Arroyo-Martínez * author of Caribes 2.0: New Media, Globalization, and the Afterlives of Disaster *
ISBN: 9781978838291
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 454g
182 pages