Colonialism Manifestations in the Caribbean

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Psychic torture and colonized force in the construction of consciousness in the Caribbean

Regression is a significant feature of human response to trauma and crucial in understanding the individual’s intrapsychic recovery processes. The relationship between the torturer and the tortured through regression deconstructs the primary basic unit of human civilization in the inner world of the individual. Such relationships in the external world are internalized in the survivor’s psychic world and linked with pain, deprivation, and dehumanization.

This often reduces the survivors’ capacity for human relatedness in the future (Scarry 25). This facet of the problem is of significant meaning in terms of future interactions between the patient and the therapist during psychotherapy. The symptomatology presented by tortured survivors should also be seen as associated with intense regression during torture and reduced relatedness capacity.

It becomes torture when physical pain is so unbearable or frightening that it reduces the victim to catastrophic helplessness or when psychic pain strips the victim of all foundations of human poise. Both physical and psychic torture, on the other hand, attacks the self. At its extreme, the pain and suffering may lead to the death of the self. Under conditions of torture, the threat of extermination is often directed concurrently at both physical and psychic life.

Torture is thus related to two luminal forms of obliterating human experience: death and evil (Levinson 72). While death destroys the body, evil tends to obliterate the self. Building the threat of death into torture to improve its effects methodically, the torturer takes over the role of absolute sovereign, master over life and death. If the victim survives, he owes his life to the torturer who could have killed him. Thus, the torturer establishes a hateful pact against life that guarantees it will not stop with the ending of real torment but carry on to exert its hold on life.

Inducing the victim to identify with anti-life or detestation of life, torture operates according to the logic of the death drive. Psychic numbing and emotional death and susceptibility to obsessive repetition and self-destructive impulses are common symptoms of this tumor. The infringement of humane ethics in torture reaches the very heart of human susceptibility. Torture induces psychic death: the victim experiences the execution of being (Reddy 53).

On the shoreline of the Caribbean, for instance, missionaries enthusiastic to “win souls for Christ” endeavored to land on their own, and the locals, after maiming and torturing them to express amusement, consumed them cooked or uncooked as required by the tradition of the local cookery. As a tenet, several months later on, a British squad car hove to the shoreline and lobbed more than six 4.5 shells into the indigenous community, and, if that not enough, landed some company of marines to hit the shrubbery and heave out a dozen to hang up on well-situated trees. Consequently, if not extremely insensitive, the people took the insinuation and appreciated the next group of missionaries who represented the God of the universe.

Also, the men of God gave out adequate food and medical care, which were accompanied by their sermons; they succeed in winning many “converts,” as the populace gained knowledge in uttering the words that are accustomed to Christianity. Although it is factual in several places in the former colonial possessions that missionaries are still tolerated, if they are submissive to the populace and reimburse well, many people have at last found out that the Gospel goes after the British contingents in the white man’s reprehensible (Schmid and Crelinsten 42).

Ever since it was set up, the Christian Church has failed completely. Moreover, that failure was palpable in every city and roughly every town of the Caribbean, year after the other. It was known even to the most badly informed and far-flung peasant. In the Caribbean, as somewhere else, the international race placed its colonies wherever there was cash to be earned from the natives, and it always followed the standard procedure used. The colonists filtered in small groups until their numbers were enough to take over a part of the city for themselves to set up their own ghettos, from which the natives of the country were casually, but effectively, barred.

Tourism in the Caribbean as the reproduction of colonialism

Around 32 million people live on the islands of the two archipelagos, which straddle the Caribbean Sea between the main continental landmarks of Florida in the north to Venezuela in the south, and the mainland territories of Belize in Central America and the Guianas in South America. There are immense differences in size and population. Despite such geographic and demographic distinctions, the Caribbean has a common heritage, molded by slavery, colonialism, and the plantation. Its people reflect that historical background: the indigenous Amerindians, European colonizers, colonists and adventurers, African slave, small-town merchant Arab, and Jew.

All such people have shaped the Caribbean of today, forging Creole societies in which old loyalties and traditions, dominated by Africa and Europe, fight now with the great power and domination of North America. During this process, the tourist industry became part of the landscape (Daye and Chambers 111). By the 1990s, all Caribbean territories were in the tourism business, as the politicians declared it ‘the engine of growth. An image of movement and acceleration of power and affluence had been touted to launch the Caribbean into development and modernism out of their poverty on the fringe of the world.

The Caribbean’s contribute to less than 2% of global tourist visits, but this is more than three times that of South Asia’s and more than two times that of Oceania. The blinkered Caribbean was given position nine in the globe on the base of its tourism proceeds in 1990 by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and by 1994 the Caribbean Tourism Organization (CTO) projected that its 34 members gained US$12 billion from tourism activities. While tourism has made footprints in almost every territory, these have differed in shape and size, form, and style. Patterns of development have reflected various factors, some reliant on natural features and geography, others on economics and politics, both within the area and globally (Duval 65).

Despite residual problems, colonialism and disintegration in the Caribbean have, in general, created a massive part of the tourist appeal of the islands. Aside from the natural pleasures of climate, beaches, and flora, the mix of African traditions with Curacao’s Dutch tang, and the Dominican Republic’s Latino pulse usually French Caribbean flavor help create a cultural attraction for millions of tourists. Also, the remains of the slave trade and urban colonial architecture provide the broadest category of heritage sites in the region.

While the Caribbean is disjointed politically, culturally, and economically, it is unified by a colonial past and a common future struggle. Moreover, virtually all the islands depend heavily on tourism as a primary source of foreign exchange and employment (Mowforth and Munt 75). Thus, the region’s islands and countries have made efforts to unite in a joint cause to develop their economic and political steadiness through multinational trade alliances, many of which deal directly or indirectly with tourism.

Just as the sexual labor of Caribbean slaves was key to the functioning of colonial economies in Europe, sex work in the contemporary Caribbean cannot be understood without reference to the transnational travel and tourism industries which link ‘consumers’ of sexual services in the developed world with ‘producers’ of these services in the developing world. Just as the juncture of sexuality, prostitution, and production in colonialism tended to foster racialized, exoticized representations of Caribbean sexuality, the modern marketing of tropical destinations, as well as the motives behind sex tourists’ travel to these places, emphasizes the historical perseverance of an exacting racialized model of Caribbean sexuality in the modern world system.

Just as sex work during colonialism allowed a certain degree of economic independence to some black slaves, Caribbean men and women are more and more using their informal participation in the sex tourism industry as a means to make ends meet in the context of shrinking options for formal wage work in traditional economic sectors.

These emerging forms of instrumental sex have been made feasible by large-scale shifts in the worldwide political economy; for instance, the extension of commercial air travel and the explosion of multinational investment in tourism infrastructure in many developing countries that have facilitated enormous numbers of middle-class tourists from more affluent nations to travel to the Caribbean on short vacations. In this sense, Caribbean sex work is intimately linked to bigger changes in forms of capital accumulation, population movement, and information technology that have been described by some theorists as basic features of the modern globalized world (Jacobs 97).

Given the spectacular growth of vacationers who frequently travel to tourism-dependent nations, in conjunction with the meticulous racialized constructions of Caribbean sexuality that have circulated internationally since the colonial era, it is conceivably not astonishing that the Caribbean is over and over again constructed by tourists as a utopian space in which to escape restrictive moral-sexual codes at home, as well as take pleasure in the greater sexual ‘freedom’ most probably allowed in ‘primitive’ Caribbean societies. This means that the Caribbean tourist industry will continue to attract tourists searching for sexual freedom as long as nothing is done about the situation.

Works Cited

Daye, Marcella and Chambers, Donna. New Perspectives in Caribbean Tourism. London: Routledge, 2008.

Duval T. David. Tourism in the Caribbean: Trends, Development, and Prospects. Volume 3 Of Contemporary Geographies Of Leisure, Tourism, And Mobility. London: Routledge, 2004.

Jacobs, Jessica. Sex, Tourism And The Postcolonial Encounter: Landscapes Of Longing In Egypt. New Directions In Tourism Analysis. New York: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd, 2010.

Levinson, Sanford. Torture: A Collection. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Mowforth, Martin and Munt, Ian. Tourism and Sustainability: Development, Globalization and New Tourism in the Third World. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2008.

Reddy, Peter. Torture: What You Need to Know. Australia: Ginninderra Press, Canberra, 2010.

Scarry, Elaine. The Body In Pain The Making And Unmaking Of The World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Schmid P. Alex and Crelinsten D. Ronald. The Politics Of Pain: Torturers And Their Masters. Boulder, Colo: Westview, 1994.

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Colonialism Manifestations in the Caribbean

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