CONSUMING THE CARIBBEAN

Abstract

The fifth chapter analyzes how Tiphanie Yanique’s Land of Love and Drowning and Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Here Comes the Sun critique the surveillance of women’s bodies. In highlighting the multigenerational impact of incest, sex work, and commercial land development, the authors foreground resistance to exploitative practices. Their works explore the interplay of structural inequalities, foreground the emotional and economic impact of exploitative practices, and question who benefits from the commoditization of land and women’s bodies. Here Comes the Sun and Land of Love and Drowning undercut the paradise myth through critical representations of tourism, sex tourism, and land development in Jamaica and the Virgin Islands. The novels call attention to the relationship between power, economics, and the surveillance of sexuality. The authors use the protagonists’ moves away from home, their respective quests for affirmation, to position home as a site of individual and collective trauma.