Tourism and Dominican Environmental Anxieties in Rita Indiana’s Tentacle

This article investigates the entanglement of global capitalism, neoliberal environmentalism, and the history of Dominican tourism at the core of Rita Indiana’s Tentacle ( La mucama de Omicunlé , 2015). In interrogating the destructive legacies of corporations like United Fruit Company and Paramount Pictures and enterprises such as contemporary ecotourism, Indiana’s novel maps the terrain of the Dominican Republic as a site of ongoing capitalist exploitation from early colonization to the contemporary moment and into the narrative’s speculative future. Tentacle depicts a journey back in time to prevent a catastrophic toxic spill from decimating the Caribbean Sea, yet the novel demonstrates that the toxic spill is a culmination of centuries of environmental harm caused by colonization, foreign exploitation on the island, and the Dominican government’s overinvestment in extractive industries. Tentacle reckons with the consequences of exploiting the natural world as an endless resource and challenges the notion of the Caribbean as paradise that has long captured the Western imagination.