Tourist Eden fantasy obscures the violence that created a place

Evidence

So ironically, a place marked by a long history of coercive labor and violence has been reinvented as an Edenic retreat where Europeans and Americans can experience nature as pure—a paradise beyond reach of work and time. We can thus read A Small Place as Kincaid’s effort to return this Eden to a transnational ethics of place. In this way, Kincaid allows us to see Antigua, like Naipaul’s Trinidad, as a shadow island, a corrective to the spatial amnesia of a self-contained, regenerative England pastoral of the kind evident in, say, E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 764

Categorization

• XREF: Directly echoes and extends the safari/lodge material — places of ‘pure nature’ as products of a violent amnesiac past. — connects to: Writing up a place serves as proto-violence that writes it off. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 267; Unregulated capitalism with amoral science converts the Eden myth into its obverse — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 931; Engels’s primitive-communism narrative secretly repeats the Eden-and-fall myth — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 481

Broader Connections

• Unregulated capitalism with amoral science converts the Eden myth into its obverse #expands (0.88) — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 931
• Writing up a place serves as proto-violence that writes it off. #corroborates (0.78) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 267
• Engels’s primitive-communism narrative secretly repeats the Eden-and-fall myth #complicates (0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 481