Recreating Ocean Space: Recreational Consumption and Representation of the Caribbean Marine Environment

This paper investigates the historical relationship between the development of marine-based tourism and representations of marine space. Over the past 100 years, the Caribbean Sea has been transformed from a transportation surface connecting exotic ports of call into a commodity itself. Imagined by early travelers as a two-dimensional space to be crossed, the Caribbean has became part of a new tropical marine aesthetic, a three-dimensional spectacle to be actively consumed and conserved. These changing representations of the marine environment as a space of consumption have been paralleled by changes in the relationships between marine and terrestrial political economies. As marine-based tourism has intensified, the balance of power among coastal resource users has shifted. The increasingly conflictive consequences of this shift are illustrated by the case of Soufrière in St. Lucia where new uses of marine space have re-configured social and economic relationships. Soufrière's coastal economy has been transformed and its marine space increasingly politicized as competing representations of the sea have been used to assert conflicting claims to resource access. This paper attempts to elucidate the power of these representations by investigating their historical relationship to the changing role of the Caribbean Sea in the international tourism industry.