Ninth International Conference on Tourism & Leisure Studies

Abstract

Parca is a Belizian woman living in a beach town that has “gone crazy” for Caribbean, paradise tourism. She plays Boledo, the national gambling game. The rules of the game are simple. Pick numbers and put as much money on them as your seductions dare you to. Parca’s Boledo picks are numbers that resonate when they feel right, and that’s when she is hailed by them to play the game. Then things get complicated. Parca’s picks multiply moments of desire for something else of life, something excitable, expressed against emergent paradise tourism futurities, felt through the post-pandemic racket of tourist street noise inciting contingent material-semiotic linkages that rub up against a Belize hooked to a world of “unsustainable sustainable tourism” that some call its “last resort.” I consider Parca’s picking strategies as a machine that cuts, assembles, and produces desire out of affective forces, bodily agitations that summon some numbers and not others, that propel and create openings and fluxes of novel relations that promise life otherwise. Parca’s picks are enactments of change because they encourage novel entanglements. I track how her picks keep Parca poised at the chancy edges of the sensible, where rogue bodily agitations trouble official images of paradise to become the affective refrains of life lived otherwise. How does Parca’s poetics of desire trouble official tourist “tropicalizations” of local life to become a process for instantiating a politics of seduction that is attached to, yet incommensurate with, the swirl of a global-imperial paradise tourism in Belize?