Abstract
Evoking an impossible and tragic-comic topical world through three stories of tourist encounters, this paper evokes the threat to, and the wisdom of, lives lived on the thresholds of local community control in the fictional coastal village of covid-traumatised Wallaceville, Belize. I ask how an emergent world of tourist encounters mobilizes a riotous love and compassion that fills Wallaceville beach and street life with hope and pride, even if it is cut through by despair and the precarious circumstances of life lived in a “tourist state”. The pressures to remake Belize into a popular tropicalized pleasure world are deeply felt in Wallaceville. Much of everyday life there lingers at the unpredictable intersections of tourist-local relationships; between exotic pleasures and cultural predicaments, a wild sense of cultural and economic opportunities, inchoate futures, mixed with a growing feeling of haunting loss and unclear possibility, the felt impacts of late-liberal global worlds and national interests rubbing up against a sense of craziness that has become what the local and ordinary is said to feel like today. I am especially interested in lingering in local scenes that instantiate the way tourist encounters generate imaginative displays of such puzzling entanglements, especially now given the lingering chaos of the COVID pandemic. Thus, this experiment focuses on how stories of Wallaceville cruise ship tourism operate as forces of affective intensity that collectively act like a pinched nerve in the body politic, generating an aesthetics of “naansense” that works to morph the powerful forces of a tourist economy.
Presenters
Kenneth LittleProfessor Emeritus, Anthropology, York University, Canada, Ontario, Canada
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Critical Issues in Tourism and Leisure Studies
KEYWORDS
CRUISE SHIP ENCOUNTERS, PANDEMIC TRAUMA, LOCAL POLITICS OF NONSENSE, BELIZE
