Landscape and postcolonialism in British West Indies travel narratives, 1815--1914

From early in the 19th century, the British West Indies increasingly came to be seen as a suitable tourism destination. Tourism to the islands grew steadily over the next ninety-nine years until temporarily disrupted by the onset of World War I. Because of the logistics of travel on the islands and the particular cultural conventions of the time, tourist landscape experiences were primarily based on vision. Consequently, tourists were physically and conceptually separated from nature and placed in a position of mastery or dominance over the landscapes of the islands visited. Travelers and tourists left a record of these landscape experiences in the form of travel narratives. These books provided information about and created distinct images of the islands in the minds of their readers. When these readers became tourists, they sought similar experiences and reaffirmed images in their own narratives, ultimately creating a cycle of expectation. In the era of early Caribbean tourism in the 19th century, patterns of tourism and tourist experiences with landscape were established. These patterns were then maintained through the cycle of expectation and have continued to influence modern tourism to the region. In this research, I analyze rural landscape descriptions in travel narratives produced between 1815 and 1914 through a system of coding, and I interpret this data based on a conceptual framework drawn from both landscape and postcolonial studies. I seek to understand the historical relationships between colonial tourists and the landscapes of the British West Indies through travel narrative representations of tourism landscape experiences. I investigate the contrasts and contradictions of these representations as a complex layering of binaries that ultimately make up the culture/nature binary system. When examined as a colonizer/colonized relationship, this binary system can illuminate the ideology behind the relationships between colonial tourists and landscapes. Finally, I discuss the implications of these early relationships and patterns, their evolution, and their influence on those of the modern era of tourism in the region.