Tourism’s [neo]Colonial Afterlives. Reading Blake C. Scott’s Unpacked: A History of Caribbean Tourism

Abstract

This paper takes Blake C. Scott’s Unpacked: A History of Caribbean Tourism as its central archive to trace the historical continuities that shape contemporary tourism in the Caribbean. It argues that leisure in the region has never been innocent but has functioned as a neocolonial system structured by infrastructures, labor hierarchies, and cultural representations. Scott’s history demonstrates how imperial projects such as the Panama Canal, mosquito eradication campaigns, and Pan American Airways transformed the Caribbean from a feared ‘white man’s graveyard’ into a consumable paradise, embedding racial and class inequalities within the very mechanics of mobility. Hotels like the Tivoli and the Havana Hilton epitomized a service economy sustained by racialized labor, where the ‘service smile’ masked exploitation. Meanwhile, travel writing, Hemingway’s dispatches, and airline advertisements naturalized the tourist gaze, erasing colonial violence and ecological transformation. By situating today’s overtourism, characterized by cruise ship congestion, environmental degradation, and service dependency, within this historical arc, the paper highlights how contemporary crises are intensifications of older colonial patterns. Bringing together historical, postcolonial, and ecocritical lenses, it calls for reimagining tourism not as extraction but as reciprocity, advocating models of slow tourism, ecological justice, and regional cooperation to resist the entitlements of neocolonial leisure economies.