Sandals Resorts, an all-inclusive chain founded in 1981 by a white Jamaican, Butch Stewart, operates 15 resorts throughout the Caribbean. The chain markets itself to a mostly white clientele by consciously presenting its resorts as spaces in which guests can safely experience the exotic “other.” In fact, Sandals so carefully preempts spontaneous contact between tourists and locals that it is possible for guests to spend their entire holiday without encountering a single island resident who is not in some way affiliated with the resort.
Basing my work on a close reading of the brands’ promotional literature, as well as my own experiences at the resorts, I explore how Sandals Resorts mediates ideas about race. Drawing on the rhetoric of the colonial-era slave plantations with references to the “Great House,” evoking the plantation through architecture and furnishings, Sandals allows tourists to fantasize their own escape from disenfranchisement by highlighting the servility of racialized others. Moreover, the resort brand naturalizes racial and national hierarchies by portraying the islanders’ servility as an inherent extension of the warm tropical setting. Finally, even as Sandals Resorts constructs a plantation fantasy for the benefit of first-world tourists, the chain simultaneously allows guests to disavow their own role in perpetuating racial/national hierarchies and power relations by offering them the possibility of participating in what is framed as socially-responsible tourism.
Countless TripAdvisor reviews written by former Sandals guests mirror the resorts’ promotional literature in their pronouncements on the islands and their people. Suggesting the need for dialogue between the fields of critical tourism studies and race/ethnic studies, I raise questions about the connection between tourism and the formation of racial ideologies. How do tourists’ encounters on the resort continue to shape their racial ideologies even after they return home?
About the presenterNicole Currier
Nicole Currier is Interim Dean of the School of Graduate and Professional Studies at Washington Adventist University and a doctoral student in the American Studies program at University of Maryland, College Park.