Tourism, terraforming and transitional states: contesting coastal futures in Jamaica

Working across multiple registers of the biological, the political-economic and the sociospatial, this paper interrogates recent trends of manipulating the Jamaican beach-ocean boundary to intensify coastal land exploitation. Driving these emerging trends, resort and villa owners engage in what we here name domesticated terraforming – the incremental transformation of an environment so as to support colonisation by existing life forms – in this case, the imagined tourist. In order to commodify terraqueous territory that is hostile to propertisation and to the local tourism model, developers are transforming the land-sea interface, enlisting the Jamaican state as accomplice to the havoc they wreak on an already “sinking” small island state, in a hurricane zone, that is vulnerable to coastal erosion and the destruction of local ecologies. The paper situates these dynamics of contemporary coastal land grabs in the context of postcolonial state governance of post-plantation geographies. Against the destruction and dismemberment of life that domesticated terraforming entails, we explore what the dynamism inherent to coastal zones as transitional states instead catalyses towards more life, livity and livingness.