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Gajalla, Radhika . "Behind the Smile: Negotiating and Transforming the Tourism Imposed Identity of Bahamian Women," American Culture Studies, Bowling Green State University, May 2009. Advisor: Radhika Gajalla
For the purpose of this dissertation, I examine the present postcolonial situation in the Bahamas, where the centuries-old perceptions of Europeans’ whiteness, as well as Europeans’ influence, have been intensified through the development of tourism. I study postcolonial Bahamas to theorize how whiteness is enacted among colonized peoples in order to describe the mechanisms under which whiteness functions along with the “othered” identities that tourism creates. The major motivation that guides this study is the need to examine and understand how historically-marginalized black Bahamian people construct their identities within a global(ization) context and in a nation-state. I argue that these identities are determined as a result of black Bahamian peoples’ interactions and encounters with tourists and that, as such, tourism produces, rather than reduces, difference: a production that helps to create, sustain, and reinvent racialized tropes of marginalized people.
Throughout this thesis, I use Frantz Fanon’s inquiry into black identity formation that is, as a construct in opposition to whiteness as a framework to examine the development of tourism and identity negotiations in the Bahamas. Fanon himself colonized French, black, expatriate, and activist knew all too well the pitfall of being at the margins of many identities. Though he occupied the margins eloquently, of course he was not content there, and would fight for a number of years throughout the African Diaspora to relieve people of color of their role as the world’s proletariat. In his analysis of identity, Fanon gives three phases which best articulate identity formation throughout the African Diaspora. Fanon’s first stage is a rejection of self, while the colonized identifies with the colonizer. In the second phase, the subject romanticizes the past, and identifies with their African ancestry. The third phase is an integration of cultures, taking the better of the two and creating a “usable” identity. Given the advent of Cultural Studies in academia, with its focus on interdisciplinary critical theory and an ever-broadening notion of identity formations and cultures, it is more possible today than before to examine Fanon’s complexities with regard to constructions of African Diasporic identities.
Moreover, this dissertation adds to the challenge of theorizing identity that Fanon, and later, Stuart Hall initiated, and presents sociopolitical and theoretical insights informed by the historical constructions of whiteness in tourist spaces from the accounts of lived experiences of black Bahamian women struggling for agency. Through my own experiences and the experiences of women working in and outside of the tourist industry, this work helps to reposition whiteness as a form of oppression of racialized Bahamian women.
Additionally, this thesis provides a new focus on producing and maintaining representations of whiteness in the ways it is constructed and contested in the lived experiences of Bahamian women. I contend, along with Babb (1998), that whiteness is a social location of structural advantage, power and privilege. In this context, I demonstrate that in tourist-populated places like the Bahamas, Cultural markets that sell souvenirs, like the Straw Markets in the Bahamas, are designed to reposition Bahamian women as exotic proletariat, and thus contribute to the continued subjugation of black Bahamian women by virtue of legitimizing white tourists’ access to illusory feelings of power and privilege.
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