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REVIEWS
| Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies. By Mimi Sheller (Routledge 2003. ix plus 252 pp.).
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| 'The horror! The horror!' might be an alternative sub-title to this book. Sheller's account of white European consumption of the Caribbean, from annexation in the fifteenth century to the early twenty-first century, transports the reader to a kind of Caribbean `Heart of Darkness'—one observed from the moral high ground of a twenty-first century Joan of Arc. Sheller, a sociologist, is no less than a committed analyst using the sword of Caribbean Studies equally against the history of white European consumerism and against the defiling pens of travel—the hacks who promote the latest version of abhorrent consumption, an abomination by which most of the region now earns a precarious living, tourism. |
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Her text makes a virtue of skipping through centuries, offering juxtapositions to illuminate the different ways that the Caribbean region has been consumed. The focus shifts from the instrumental and practical cataloging of indigenous plants exported and exploited by European pharmacology, to the consumption of Caribbean produce in Europe, especially sugar (dripping with the blood of slaves), Caribbean landscapes and ultimately Caribbean bodies, especially black and East Indian Caribbean bodies. Mobility and stasis underpin this moralistic history of consumption. |
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Sheller's thesis, essentially, is that the Caribbean, viewed in a global context, allows privileged (white) people from Europe and things produced in the Caribbean to have the advantage of mobility, while the exploited (blacks) in the Caribbean are held captive to do the shit work, or to receive the tourist or travel writer's licentious gaze and, indeed, sometimes their bodies. `Book me a ticket', I'd say if I was in Europe; but I'm already in the region, so I'll confine my observations to some of the issues that the text raises. |
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