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Many less developed countries are expanding their tourism industries and these are seen to be crucial to their economic development. Yet such activities can also create social, cultural and environmental problems. This book provides a review of many of the key issues involved in tourism in developing countries and presents a range of case studies. These are interpreted from a perspective of the sociology and anthropology of development. Case study chapters are presented from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America and Oceania. The book provides essential reading for advanced students and researchers in tourism and development studies.

Winner of the Caribbean Studies Association's 2016 Barbara T. Christian Award for Best Book in the Humanities Tourists flock to the Caribbean for its beaches and spread more than just blankets and dollars. Indeed, tourism has overly affected the culture there. Resisting Paradise explores the import of both tourism and diaspora in shaping Caribbean identity. It examines Caribbean writers and others who confront the region's overdependence on the tourist industry and the many ways that tourism continues the legacy of colonialism. Angelique V. Nixon interrogates the relationship between culture and sex within the production of "paradise" and investigates the ways in which Caribbean writers, artists, and activists respond to and powerfully resist this production. Forms of resistance include critiquing exploitation, challenging dominant historical narratives, exposing tourism's influence on cultural and sexual identity in the Caribbean and its diaspora, and offering alternative models of tourism and travel. Resisting Paradise places emphasis on the Caribbean people and its diasporic subjects as travelers and as cultural workers contributing to alternate and defiant understandings of tourism in the region. Through a unique multidisciplinary approach to comparative literary analysis, interviews, and participant observation, Nixon analyzes the ways Caribbean cultural producers are taking control of representation. While focused mainly on the Anglophone Caribbean, the study covers a range of territories including Antigua, the Bahamas, Grenada, Haiti, Jamaica, as well as Trinidad and Tobago, to deliver a potent critique.

Due to its centrality to the processes of transnational mobilities, migration and globalization, tourism studies has the potential to make a significant contribution to understanding the postcolonial experience. Drawing together theoretical and applied research, this fascinating book illuminates the links between tourism, colonialism and postcolonialism. Significantly, it creates a space for the voices of authors from postcolonial countries. Chapters are integrated and examined through concepts taken from the wider postcolonial literature, which identify tourism not only as an international industry but also as a postcolonial cultural form, which by its very nature is based on past and present day colonial structural relationships. The first book to explicitly explore the contribution tourism can make to the postcolonial experience, this book is an essential read for students of tourism, cultural studies and geography.