eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics

Mariana Poems: Visiting Rem(a)inders of War

2026-03-04T16:26:40+10:00

The three poems, “Saipan,” “Tinian” and “Guam,” focus on the theme of anti-aesthetics and tropical tourism. Prior to World War II, the Northern Mariana Islands including Saipan and Tinian were occupied by Japan while the southernmost island in the chain, Guam, was controlled by the USA. There was fierce fighting between the two powers on these Pacific islands during the war. Significantly, the aircraft that dropped the atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshimi and Nagasaki, which ended the war, took off from Tinian. Promoted tourism today to the Marianas is primarily for the idealised tropical beach holiday, however, away from the coast, memorials to the horrors of the war on each of the islands can by visited by those willing to engage with often uneasy dark or anti-aesthetic tourism.

I Am a Tree: A Monologue on Tropical Ecotourism

2026-03-04T16:26:42+10:00

This ecospiritual poem is a lyrical monologue from the perspective of a tropical tree within the landscape of rainforest ecotourism, symbolizing resistance against the commodification of nature and the expansion of capitalist tourism. Through a contemplative voice, it exposes the paradox between the promotion of “natural” destinations and the silent destruction of ecosystems beneath their surface. Framing an ecocritical and spiritual narrative rooted in the ancient Javanese–Balinese cosmology of Kahyangan, a sacred realm where divinity and nature coexist, the poem presents a decolonial critique of how the tropical environment is aestheticized and marketed. Imagery such as “a saw that doesn’t know poetry” and “breath piercing the sky” serve as metaphors of both ecological devastation and hope. This piece functions as an ecological prayer, a quiet resistance from the rainforest’s forgotten voices amidst the machinery of global capitalism.

The True Fighter of Tropical Melancholy: Poetic Reflections beneath the Paradise Brochure

2026-03-04T16:26:41+10:00

This poem is a lyrical reflection on the melancholia and paradoxes of tropical tourism: beneath the glossy imagery of paradise lies the silent endurance of those who sustain its beauty with their bodies and breath. The True Fighter of Tropical Melancholy: Poetic Reflections beneath the Paradise Brochure gives voice to rural and informal workers who remain unseen in brochures but are the living core of the tropics. Rather than beneficiaries of tourism, they are its invisible custodians, displaced, overworked, and overlooked. Through a poetic and ethnographic lens, this piece explores the emotional and structural dimensions of tropical melancholy, revealing the inequities, symbolic erasures, and loss of livelihood beneath the promise of paradise.

On Being an Eco-Tourist Guide and Wannabe Eco-Terrorist in Sarawak

2026-03-04T17:57:08+10:00

In the not-too-distant future, a young woman learns to be an eco-tourist guide in a tamed Sarawak in Malaysian Borneo. Under the guise of a light-hearted, even humorous voice, she guides 22^ndcentury tourists in a familiar and yet not-familiar Kuching, with its tropical dystopian versions of the famous Cultural Village, Semenggoh Wildlife Centre, and Bako National Park. But what starts out as an idyllic tropical eco-tour holiday turns into the chaos of an eco-terrorist attack, the objective of which is to free caged wildlife, including bearded pigs, silver langurs, and proboscis monkeys.

An Ascendant in Scorpio: Dark Tourism in the Kingdom of Cambodia, a Travelogue

2025-11-23T13:30:41+10:00

An eight-legged dark tourist with a freshly starched pith helmet, Sydney’s travels in Cambodia take him to the small town of Skuon, where people snack on fried tarantulas. The trip to Skuon, however, becomes more than just a tropical dark tourist tick box; instead, transforming into a sweaty pilgrimage into the crevices of Sydney’s ravaged psyche. During Syd’s journey, he must embrace his fears and ingest the beast within or forever wallow in the purgatory of his shadow self and its eternal torments. Caught in a web of vampiric arachnids, he must be careful not to become prey, tempted by the sordid touristic pleasures of the war-torn Kingdom. This travelogue, of the psyche and Cambodia, influenced by the genre of magical realism, is accompanied by images generated by Canva AI.

Translating the Tropical Tourist Gaze: Hyperreal Asia in Pico Iyer’s Video Night in Kathmandu

2026-03-04T16:26:36+10:00

This article reads Pico Iyer’s Video Night in Kathmandu (1988) as a late–20^th century travelogue that registers the rise of a global tourist-media economy by showing how tropics are manufactured as an image-world—portable, purchasable, and increasingly self-conscious about its own display. By extending Orientalism through the lens of tropicality, treating “the tropics” as an environmental Orientalism in which climate and landscape become cultural explanation, moral alibi, and commercial asset, the article argues that Iyer’s most revealing scenes are not only about the circulation of American cultural forms but about the environmental staging that makes those forms feel natural to consume. Iyer’s itinerary shows tropicality operating less as strict geography than as a traveling aesthetic: paradise-and-peril, sensual overflow, managed risk, and atmospheric authenticity, refitted for the age of package tourism, franchised leisure, and air-conditioned comfort. The article frames travel writing as an unstable practice of cultural and climatic translation, oscillating between domestication by analogy and estrangement by excess, and argues that Video Night is neither a simple critique of Americanization nor a lament for lost authenticity, but a reflexive account of how tropical environments are converted into consumable scenes—and how that conversion remains tethered to infrastructures, labour, and uneven vulnerability.

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

2025-10-16T11:52:36+10:00

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.

Hawai‘i beyond Tropical Overtourism: Decolonial Perspectives on Jasmin ‘Iolani Hakes’ Hula

2026-03-04T16:26:36+10:00

This paper examines Jasmin ‘Iolani Hakes’ debut novel Hula (2023) as a decolonial critique of tropical overtourism, land dispossession, and cultural commodification in Hawai‘i. The study investigates how the novel, which follows a strong heritage of Kānaka Maoli writing, reimagines Native Hawaiian experiences within the colonial matrix of power, and reveals Indigenous strategies of resistance and resilience. The paper examines the ways Hula depicts tropical tourism as a continuation of colonial violence, and how it foregrounds Indigenous epistemologies to counter the tourist imaginary of Hawai‘i as tropical “paradise.” It does this through a close textual analysis of Hula, cross-referenced with Aníbal Quijano’s (2000) concept of the “coloniality of power,” Walter Mignolo’s (2009) theory of “epistemic disobedience,” and ecocritical insights from Rob Nixon. The findings reveal that the novel portrays tropical tourism as a subtle extension of colonial conquest: erasing Native presence and accelerating environmental degradation. The novel simultaneously demonstrates epistemic disobedience through the preservation of authentic hula (dance form), communal storytelling, and activism against military and corporate encroachments. The study concludes that the novel disrupts the normalizing of tropical tourism by centering Native Hawaiian agency, and reframing Hawai‘i not as a consumable paradise but as a contested homeland where cultural resurgence and sovereignty remain vital.

African Tropics and Ecological Crisis: Tourist Gaze in Helon Habila’s Oil on Water and Travellers

2026-03-04T16:26:38+10:00

The paper examines how Helon Habila’s novels, Oil on Water (2010) and Travellers (2019), critique the tourist gaze as a means of commercializing ecological degradation and human dislocation in the vulnerable African tropics. Drawing on an African and Western postcolonial ecocritical framework, it demonstrates how Habila’s narratives foreground the convergence of tourism, extractive capitalism, slow ecological violence, and neocolonial power dynamics. Applying John Urry’s concept of the tourist gaze, Rob Nixon’s theory of slow violence, and Judith Butler’s notion of grievability, this paper argues that Habila’s work shifts tourism studies and ecocriticism towards ecological justice and decolonial ethics. The paper highlights African environmental activism and intellectual traditions, particularly legacies inherited from Ken Saro-Wiwa and Wangari Maathai, by situating Habila’s novels within a much longer history concerning resistance against environmental degradation in Africa. This paper attends to both theoretical dimensions as well as textual particulars within Habila’s novels while contributing toward a postcolonial ecocriticism that resists Western domination over environmental knowledge by insisting on African epistemologies as central to any broader understanding of environmental crisis.

From Tropicality and Tourist Gaze to Affective Geography: Reclaiming Kochi in Cobalt Blue

2026-03-04T16:26:34+10:00

Sachin Kundalkar’s 2022 Indian Hindi-language feature film Cobalt Blue, which streamed on Netflix, is an adaptation of his 2006 Marathi novel of the same name, which Jerry Pinto translated into English. While the novel is set in Pune in the Indian state of Maharashtra, Kundalkar deliberately set the film in Kochi in India’s southern state of Kerala. This article problematizes this mislocation of the film’s setting, arguing that it creates a dialectical tension. On the one hand, the narration embodies a continuum between colonial discourse on tropicality (which codified tropical spaces as exotic, erotic, and perilous) and the capitalist spectacle of the tourist gaze (and Netflix gaze); on the other hand, it reduces the city of Kochi to a consumable place devoid of the logic of affective geography. This article traces the genealogy of colonial tropicality in relation to Kochi and examines how it is reproduced in the film as a continuum, with the city being showcased as a consumable place within the circuits of film tourism. It also demonstrates how the film’s narrative subverts this very continuum by engendering an affective geography. A comparative reading of the novel and the film is furthermore conducted to establish how the paying guest (whose grammar in the narrative enables him to navigate the tropes of being a tourist, alongside subcategories such as ‘drifter’ and ‘post-tourist’) acts as a catalyst affecting the protagonists—the brother Tanay and sister Anuja—when the guest becomes their romantic and sexual interest and thus engenders the affective geography. The article draws on the theories of Dean MacCannell, John Urry, Sara Ahmed, and select philosophical frameworks of Alain Badiou.

Tourisms’ Tristes Tropiques I: Literary Travels

2026-03-04T16:26:33+10:00

Tourisms’ Tristes Tropiques draws attention to this tropical zone where the full scale and scope of tourism and its associated challenges and consequences are rapidly becoming materially manifest. Tristes Tropiques refers to the title of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ famous work. That he wrote about the “sad tropics” in a memoir-travelogue is significant. Through a literary and reflexive engagement, he draws our attention to the important place literature, in its many forms, has in the anthropology of tourism and critical tourism studies. Travel literature, rather than being merely fictional, often presents the crude reality of tourism in the tropics and is essential to tourism studies. This first collection of papers (in a two-part special issue) entitled Tourisms’ Tristes Tropiques I: Literary Travels, addresses the importance of travel literatures of and from the tropics. It presents works from the Pacific, Indonesia, Sarawak on Borneo, Cambodia, Asia, Hawai’i, Africa, and the Caribbean. Genres include poetry, dystopian futures, travelogues, travel novels, and a history of tourism.