Global Theory and Touristic Encounters

The economic dependency of the Eastern Caribbean on tourism has been welldocumented (Ferguson 1997, Lea 1998, Patullo 1996). A large element of its attractiveness depends on its connotations of paradise in the Minority World, and therefore it is an economic necessity that paradise is continually simulatable. The widespread development of all-inclusive resorts, or what Bauman has termed ‘reservation-style experiences’ (1998: 58), organises social space as a simulacra of widely circulated images, and it is a structuration which approaches culture as a factor of risk and uncertainty. Furthermore, not only does a large amount of tourist/host contact take place within this confinement, but it is increasingly the normative setting for representations of the Caribbean in media texts.