Postcolonial nations, islands, and tourism: reading real and imagined spaces

Helen Kapstein (2017). Postcolonial nations, islands, and tourism: reading real and imagined spaces. 226pp. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. ISBN: 978-1-78348-6458. US$120.

In Postcolonial Nations, Islands, and Tourism: Reading Real and Imagined Spaces, Helen Kapstein offers previously published and new research to illustrate how the tourist gaze organizes the postcolonial island/nation, from within and without. The book is an enjoyable, richly developed monograph which uses critical theory "to return a critical gaze on the normative and ideal island space." She analyses how island spaces and "tourist tales" have been used in literary texts and the popular imagination "to shore up the fiction of the nation" as it "struggles to maintain its intactness." Kapstein effectively exposes the "dirty work of colonialism" in challenging the fictions and violence that undergird both tourism and nation-building in a global economy.

Kapstein's academic background is in Anglophone postcolonial comparative literary and cultural studies. Her book is organized geographically into three sections of two chapters each; focused on England, Sri Lanka, and South Africa respectively. Across chapters, Kapstein examines the island as a paradox that is "supplemented and reiterated by other spaces, real and imagined, internal and external" while she deconstructs the "false dichotomies of islandness versus connectedness and coherence versus contamination." She establishes in Chapter One the failure of the island to provide a central organizing concept for the nation. She shows the island, the nation, and the Robinsonade genre as similarly elusive and vulnerable. Chapter Two, like the book itself, is full of examples which compete for the lead. Many deserve their own volumes.

The book's second section reviews emerging trends in tourism through Sri Lankan author Romesh Gunesekera's oeuvre. Herein, Kapstein illustrates how nation-building around tourism is a "global proposition-a mode of translation (albeit a fraught one)" that works at many scales. Her choice of fictions displays tourism in its "frustrated, messy, and failed forms." She describes adventure and dark tourism as manifestations of the postmodern tourist's desire for authenticity or "a reality effect, that is, for wanting to be an insider" where increasingly, "work and war become the object of the tourist gaze" in "a new kind of safari" (Gunesekera's term). Her applied focus in this section on the tactics and strategies of tourism provides clear connections between theory and material (economic) effects; for instance, she observes that both the nation and the island share the priorities of "accumulation, storage, and investment in a particular space." Here, as well, Kapstein demonstrates her ecocritical sensibility when analyzing both the agency and neoliberal production of nature as an integral part of nationbuilding. She impressively describes in a single frame the "vexed spaces" and "shared violence" of the nature preserve, the game park, and the war zone, wherein the impossibility of achieving authenticity increasingly "ratchets up the tourist experience," suggesting more disturbing trends to come.

Kapstein's final section on Robben Island is her strongest. As the product of mixed methods, these chapters upstage her earlier text-based analyses. Her complementary combination of close reading, field study, discourse analysis, and primary source archival research best exemplifies an interdisciplinary approach that "lends equal authority to different kinds of knowledge." Here, she provides insightful readings of "cultural artifacts" such as visitor questionnaires, memoirs, correspondence, advertising, and official documents. Kapstein also vividly describes her experiences as a young researcher in place (including being a castaway "stranded" overnight on Robben Island). The methodological shift between chapters provides markedly different reading experiences yet advances her goal of moving beyond island "as trope" to examine "actual power relations, specific geographies, and material economies." This section also does the most radical work. Throughout the book, after Homi Bhabha, Kapstein catalogues ways in which the center-periphery dichotomy is "disrupted." Noting that returning the colonial gaze "is a key component of postcolonial empowerment," she is purposefully "making space for resistant [re]imaginings" which might "destabilize those same spaces." For example, these final chapters raise social justice questions of uneven access to and control over the world heritage site for average South African residents and "domestic tourists." Additionally, her analysis of the "Brand South Africa" campaign reveals contested visions of the new nation after apartheid. The book could be strengthened by theoretical engagement with uneven development, decolonization, (neo)coloniality/modernity, etc., as well as by the inclusion of more diverse, local voices. A different book-perhaps better focused on "the real lives of most people on the (post)colonial margins"-might find Kapstein deeper in the field, collecting her own visitor surveys and interviews. Missing is a reflexive statement of positionality and/ or solidarity with her subjects; as Kapstein wrote in these pages recently, "we must ask who our work is in the service of."

Kapstein explains why the island and the center will not hold. Though she analyzes these as unstable categories (reproduced and reinvented in new spatial configurations and forms of colonial violence), she stops short of imagining them differently. Needed is a conclusion section to consider implications and alternatives. For instance, the book's many interisland, intertidal examples-including Jonathan Raban's Coasting and Gunesekera's Reef and Noontide Toll-could benefit from an archipelagic analysis, largely avoided here. Archipelagic readings of being (adrift) in-between or just beyond states seem pertinent to Kapstein's argument against insularity. Describing the irony of Brexit, she asserts this wider (more archipelagic) perspective: "retreating to island status does not reject global interconnectedness; it reaffirms it." To rethink the island begs the question of what replaces it, locating island and archipelagic studies squarely in the unique, interdisciplinary position to confront some of the most pressing challenges of our time. The stakes are high with the compounded problems of climate change, limits to growth, geopolitical tensions over immigration and refugees, the rise in nationalism, etc. Abandoning such island myths and mentalities is imperative; Kapstein proves why it is necessary and proper to so argue forcefully.

Jenny R. Isaacs

Rutgers University, USA

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