LACS 265-000: Visitor Meets Native (Spring 2010)

The Caribbean is the most intensively exploited tourism destination in the world, and yet the significance of the industry to the area is less well understood than comparable experiences such as plantation agriculture, slavery and colonialism. This course will bring together existing research to examine tourism as at one time an economic enterprise and also as a deeply significant cultural experience that has played an under-recognized part in shaping the cultural mores and lifestyles of both the island destinations and the home countries. The course will address such complex and controversial questions as how much does tourism contribute to economic development, especially when sustainability issues are considered; what are the links between tourism and crime, especially drugs and prostitution; and how real are the supposed threats of tourism to national identity. The course will be interdisciplinary in nature, with sources from anthropology, history, literature and popular culture, and will also include selections from music and film.