Goldstein VtP: Reading Places

Antigua as Kincaid describes it for her readers is through the dual eyes of a white tourist from either North America or the United States. Kincaid often has critics calling her “angry.” I don’t read her as angry, or not unjustifiably so. What you“see” as a tourist, she begins A Small Place, already setting the divide for what a tourist (you are likely from the United States or Europe) and looking for sunshine and surf. You do and do not see the loans for fancy cars that override monetary support for homes, infrastructure development, or the facilitation of white (presumably male) tourists on a sex-vacation.  What you do and do not see the food grown and then flown off the island and then back again, the open sewage in the ocean, the government corruption, the hate beyond the islanders’ smiles…