Velvet Nelson

Traces of the past: the cycle of expectation in Caribbean tourism representations.

Tourism representations can be highly influential and extremely pervasive. This paper investigates the origins of the vivid imagery common in todays Caribbean tourism representations. The 99-year period from 1815 to 1914 was a key era in the development of tourism for the British West Indies with increased geopolitical stability, improved transportation, and increased demand for new tourism experiences. With the growing popularity of travel, as well as the popularity of travel writing as a genre in British literature, more people travelled to the region as tourists and wrote about their experiences. The detailed descriptions and illustrations in travel narratives created popular geographies about the islands. Tourists were both potential consumers and producers of these popular geographies. They frequently read travel literature prior to and during travel, thereby carrying images with them to recreate the experiences described. Some also chose to write their own travel narratives, thereby reaffirming the imagery of the Caribbean. Narratives were further cited in travel guides and regional geographies, effectively extending their influence. This pattern became a cycle of expectation, in which ideas about the region were established and perpetuated. As a result, evidence of past representations may be seen in those of the present.

Peru's image as a culinary destination

ABSTRACT Destination image is the cumulative product of individuals processing information about a destination over time. This image comes from different sources, like media articles intended to inform a general audience and promotional materials intended to persuade potential tourists to visit. Various aspects of a destination can provide the focal point for its image, including its unique foods. With the growing interest in food in the media and in tourism, the image of places around the world is increasingly centered on this topic. Peru offers a timely case study to investigate this issue; in recent years, it has gained an international reputation as a culinary destination. The research discussed in this paper examines both popular media articles and official tourism promotions to understand the devices used to construct Peru as a culinary destination. It uses quantitative and qualitative content analysis of magazine and newspaper articles targeted at an American audience and the U.S./English version of the Official Travel and Tourism Portal. This research finds that the image of Peru as a culinary destination is consistent between sources, but there are some differences in the meanings of this content based on type of source, intended audience, and expectations about that audience.

Promoting energy strategies on Eco-Certified accommodation websites

The attention on climate change by the international media and the international tourism industry has generated greater interest in issues of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. This study seeks to explore the intersection of these two foci. The purpose of this paper is to examine the type of information about energy use and strategies to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions provided by accommodations Eco-Certified by Ecotourism Australia. Specifically, this examination addresses what information is provided, how it is presented, and what the objectives are in promoting this information. Although energy issues are a component in Eco Certification, just under half of the 50 accommodations included provided information about energy on their websites. These accommodations provided information about activities undertaken in each of four strategies previously identified for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the accommodation sector – reducing energy use, improving energy efficiency, increasing alternative energy consumption, and offsetting emissions – and related this information to the ecotourism tenets of environmental sustainability, environmental education, and economic viability. While some accommodation operators chose to provide this information to potential tourists as a possible means of product differentiation, most did so to raise awareness and ultimately to try to change behaviours.

Place reputation: representing Houston, Texas as a creative destination through culinary culture

Place reputation refers to the composite of ideas held by external audiences that play an important role in the development and success of that place. A negative place reputation can be very slow and difficult to change, but place reputation management seeks to adjust it so that it is closer to how stakeholders would like the place to be perceived. Research suggests that this should reflect the quality of place (i.e. what is there, who is there, and what is going on there) that defines it and makes it attractive to both residents and tourists. This research examines a place reputation management strategy employed by the Houston Convention & Visitors Bureau (HCVB) in which the organizations website features media articles as an ‘objective’ depiction of the city. Quantitative and qualitative content analysis of 66 media articles, including 425 photographs, revealed an emphasis on Houstons culinary culture. In particular, the manifest content shows that independent local restaurants driven by innovative chefs inspired by various influences are creating a vibrant culinary culture. The latent content shows that an understanding of this culinary culture can offer greater insight into the city, beyond the stereotypes, that allows one to better appreciate the quality of place that makes it a creative destination.

Community corporate joint ventures: an alternative model for pro-poor tourism development.

Particularly in light of the 2000 United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), governments, multilateral aid agencies, non-government organizations (NGOs) and local communities are increasingly “harnessing” tourism for poverty alleviation in lesser development countries (LDCs). In the case of the Yucatan Peninsula, rural Maya communities have had little opportunity for participation in the tourism industry beyond low wage labour in the Mexican Caribbean tourist poles. Yet, tourist demand for “authentic” experiences is strong enough to suggest that community-based rural tourism among the Maya could potentially achieve the pro-poor tourism (PPT) objective of channelling tourism earnings to low-wealth villages. The purpose of this article is to present a conceptual framework for a community corporate joint venture to achieve this PPT objective. In this article we discuss the conventional model for tourism development and present an alternative model for community-based rural tourism enterprises. This model, created from a broader rural development program that was successfully pilot tested by the authors, is applied in the case of collectively owned Mexican ejido lands in the Yucatan Peninsula but also has applicability for alternative tourism ventures in other collective land tenure contexts.

‘R.I.P. Nature Island’: the threat of a proposed oil refinery on Dominica's identity

Dominica is a small island nation in the eastern Caribbean Sea that has long struggled with issues of poverty and development. To improve these conditions, the government formed a preliminary agreement with Venezuela to build a multimillion dollar oil refinery on the island. Some discussion about this proposal took place in local forums, such as radio talk shows, but additional discussion took place online. Internet-based media, including online reproductions of traditional media and new types of media such as interactive discussion forums and weblogs, were used not only to continue the discussion but also to raise awareness among a wider audience. The framework for appealing to such a disparate set of interests both locally and abroad was already in place: the islands ‘nature island’ identity. The project was perceived as a threat to quality and aesthetic appearance of the nature island as well as a threat to the concept of Dominica as the ‘nature island’. This paper examines the role of Dominicas identity at the heart of this perceived threat in the construction of environmental discourses through internet-based media, such as online newspapers with associated discussion forums and blogs.

The sensibility of aesthetic landscape concepts in the case of British West Indies travel narratives, 1815–1914

In the tradition of landscape traced back to the emergence of landscape painting, the techniques of art provided the basis for selecting a vantage point or prospect, from which to view the landscape, and for framing the scene. Meanwhile, the development of aesthetic concepts such as the sublime, beautiful, picturesque, and romantic provided the means of evaluating landscape scenery. These concepts provided a highly structured way of seeing intended to standardize the experience of landscape and remove the personal response. The purpose of this paper is to explore the trends of landscape appreciation based on the use of these four aesthetic concepts in the case study of the British West Indies during the formative years of tourism between 1815 and 1914. In travel narrative descriptions of landscape experiences, writers continued to use each of the terms: sublime, beautiful, picturesque, and romantic. However, with increasing emphasis on personal experience and emotional response, these terms were used less to depict specific types or characteristics of landscape than to generally indicate the sensibility of an attractive landscape.

Dominica's lime industry: Agriculture and identity in the early twentieth century

This article examines the lime industry on the island of Dominica and the role it, as the dominant economic activity in the early twentieth century, played in the negotiation of identity. Economic narratives are used to explore this negotiation as the industry, and the islands prosperity, rose and fell. Examining the cycle of narratives provides insight into the creation of unity among agricultural producers that encouraged development of the lime industry. The industry arose from the suffering brought to the island by the collapse of sugar, and allowed the island a period of glory until the cycle returned to suffering.

Object narratives and the enslaved at Sam Houston memorial museum

ABSTRACT Objects offer an opportunity to narrate the past. Tourism scholarship has found that plantation museums in the American South give considerable attention to objects associated with the planter class to engage visitors with stories about them and their lifestyle. At the same time, museum stakeholders have cited a lack of objects associated with the enslaved as a barrier to greater representations of slavery. However, the concept of an interface object indicates objects can be used to make connections between things that are not intrinsic and to insert issues into stories that are told. These objects can even become charged with such issues. Using the case study of the Sam Houston Memorial Museum in Huntsville, Texas (USA), this paper considers the use of objects in narrating the past, particularly as it relates to slavery. It draws upon participant observation of guided tours and narrative analysis of the stories told about the enslaved on the Houston farm to consider how ordinary objects are used to incorporate slavery into the overarching museum narrative. Finally, the paper concludes that such objects are effective in initiating the conversation about slavery but are not sufficiently charged to facilitate a more meaningful engagement with the issue.

Tropical Whites: The Rise of the Tourist South in the Americas

Tropical Whites: The Rise of the Tourist South in the Americas is an ambitious undertaking. In her contribution to the Nature and Culture in America series, cultural historian Catherine Cocks brings together a diverse set of topics ranging from environmental determinism to heterosexual liberalism to explore the role that the tourist industry played in changing ideas U.S. whites held about—and consequently their interactions with—the tropics between the 1880s and the 1940s. In the introduction, Cocks opens with the metaphor from the title: At the end of the nineteenth century, U.S. whites traveling south for the winter would change into the lightweight white clothing of summer as they made the transition from the temperate regions to more tropical ones. Using this as the central theme, she effectively applies this metaphor of tropical whites throughout the discussion to describe the idea that whites could travel to the tropics for short periods of time to enjoy the newly perceived benefits of the tropics without losing the long valued qualities of temperate life.