Working Paradise: An Ethnographic Study of Tourism Labor in the 21st Century Caribbean

Ayondela McDole Stephenson

Advisor: Roger N Lancaster, PhD, Cultural Studies Program

Committee Members: Alison Landsberg, Mathew Karush

Horizon Hall, #6325 https://gmu.zoom.us/j/98463738085
April 08, 2024, 12:30 PM to 02:30 PM

Abstract:

Tourism in the Bahamas was popularized in the 1950s following WWII, but it saw a significant rise during the 1970s thanks to neoliberal capital globalization. The deregulation of international travel and the softening of international borders under globalization allowed tourism to become a large, globalized market; today, the tourism industry makes up 60% of Bahamas’ GDP. This dissertation is a five-year ethnography of a luxury resort in the Bahamas that through participant observation, oral histories and interviews examined the day-to-day social relations between staff, management and tourists to address the impact of the tourism industry on local Caribbean citizens. Ultimately this project illustrates that due to the racial segregation arranged in the colonial period the tourism industry serves as a hospitality pipeline that is difficult for Black Bahamians to escape. This project uses tourism to expose how wage laborers are exploited into doing work beyond the wage through coercive tactics, wage theft and affective labor in order to fashion a notion of paradise dependent on Black subserviency.