Caribbean Inhospitality - (Critical Caribbean Studies) by Natalie Lauren Belisle

About the Book

Caribbean Inhospitality juxtaposes the Caribbean's reputation for being hospitable to foreigners with the alienation of the Caribbean citizen-subject from nations they call home. Reading literary, cinematic, and digital texts, Natalie Lauren Belisle demonstrates that this inhospitality is institutionalized through the aesthetic, reproducing itself in the laws that condition belonging and membership in the Caribbean nation-state.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"By doing a critical reading of the dynamics of tourist economies and displacement, local versus 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"

"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"

About the Author

NATALIE LAUREN BELISLE is an assistant professor of Spanish and comparative literature at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. This is her first book.