Consuming the Caribbean: Tourism, Sex Tourism, and Land Development in Nicole Dennis-Behn's <i>Here Comes the Sun</i>

Abstract

In Here Comes the Sun, Nicole Dennis-Behn explores the interplay of structural inequalities and questions who benefits from the commoditization of land and women’s bodies. The author utilizes the space of a fictional resort, a site where racial and economic tensions play out, to examine asymmetrical power relations. The novel situates sexual exploitation and environmental devastation as parallel forces and demonstrates that the stigma against homosexual intimacy functions as a site of social control. This article extends scholarship on the trope of Caribbean paradise by reading the service economies in the novel as a set of consumptive industries that are reliant on consumer fantasies. My analysis considers the novel in light of recent scholarship on the relationship between landscape and power, the function of racial-sexual economies in the Caribbean, and the construction of the Caribbean picturesque. I argue that Dennis-Behn positions Jamaican citizens as perpetrators as well as beneficiaries of extractive and exploitative practices to complicate understandings of intersecting systems of oppression.