Passage from A Small Place by Jamaica Kincade, "An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you, that behind their closed doors they laugh at your strangeness..." (p. 17)
Scene in Life and Debt: The tour buss is driving past McDonalds, Taco Bell, and other restaurants that the tour guide announces with a noted pride. She advertises the Jamaica she lives in to these tourists. Bob Marley's song plays in the background while the tour guide continues to say things like their driving on the left side of the road may be wrong, but it's how you stay alive in Jamaica.
Like Alexandra said in her post, the main connecting globalization signifier is the song, "One love" by Bob Marley, as it is used in countless commercials for Jamaica. It almost is used ironically in the Life and Debt movie, to play on its use, or known use in commercials to advertise the country, and that in and of itself is a globalization marker. In other words, it takes for granted that the viewer knows the song, and that it has been the main choice in commercials for travel to Jamaica, which emphasizes the main theme of the film.
Also, I believe the use of the English language is a signifier of globalization, as it is fastly becoming the business standard in business deals between countries that don't deal with the US, like Korea and Japan, which is very surprising. As Alexandra also talked about in her post, the use of English by foreigners coming into the US is expected almost to the point of obligation, yet the reverse is not the case, and instead the majority of Americans traveling abroad know no such practice, and instead many do expect there to be English-speaking facilities. As the clip from the film points out, the fact that there is guided tours in English in Jamaica does say two things about the nation: One, that it is making a conscious effort to attract tourists, which Kincade reminds us is a dirty, ugly thing, instead of a person, and Two, that the tours carried out in Jamaica are mainly for American or English speaking countries.
It seems to me that due to globalization, the tourist is the byproduct of the process that gives those who oppose globalization a point on which to focus. The tourist, who marvels at the everyday of another, in generalizations, is referred to as an ugly thing, I believe, because Kincade knows that by making the world flat and accessible to everyone means that people's lives will be regarded like a kind of living museum, something to be tasted and enjoyed then remembered only in photographs and trinkets.
Also , I believe there's some reasoning behind how Kincade states not every tourist is ugly ordinarily, from day to day, but it is when they observe for enjoyment the everyday of someone else that they become this ugly creature. I think it might have something to do with resentment at the everyday being made into a spectacle for someone else, but still being ordinary to the one living it, but I'm not quite sure.
Your reading of Kincaid in the last paragraph is on point.
ReplyDeleteThe "English" question is also very much related to what we've said in class about global English--because English is in fact Jamaica's national language, but a different kind of English, with different inflections. Notice how the tour-guide speaks British English to the Americans--in this sense it is not even so much an issue of the tourists learning another language, only adjusting their ears in an attempt to understand a different way of speaking their own.