Nature tourism’s effortless tranquility is labor-intensive-made-invisible

Evidence

What surfaces for Ndebele, like Jordan and Kincaid before him, is a vexed relationship to labor, both historically and in the present. The violent labor histories that shaped the colonial landscapes of the Caribbean and South Africa were inseparable from forced removals, whether trans-Atlantic or internal to the white settler nation-state (via first the Native reserves and later the Bantustans). Given this anguished history, all these writers are angered by the labor-intensive production of labor’s illusory absence, an absence critical to the eco-archaic’s role in producing a sweat-free, soft-focus, natural tranquility that appears at once effortless and untouched by human history. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 525

Categorization

• XREF: Directly bridges the reader’s ecofeminist labor strand and the Soundscape slow-violence thread: the ‘labor-intensive production of labor’s illusory absence’ parallels quiet being engineered around noise. — connects to: Visitors arrive for recreation yet readily accept nature’s invitation to wonder — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 706