Anita M. Waters. Planning the Past: Heritage Tourism and Post-Colonial Politics at Port Royal. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006. x + 125 pp. $66.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7391-0879-6; $18.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7391-1775-0.
Reviewed by John Walton (Department of Humanities, University of Central Lancashire)
Published on H-Travel (September, 2007)
Admirals, Buccaneers, Commemoration, and Community
This brief analysis of the content, assumptions, and political infighting of a series of heritage tourism projects at Port Royal, Jamaica since the 1950s explores interesting problems surrounding the uses of history (whose history?) in the promotion of tourist destinations. At its core, it is a study in serial failure: none of the projects that are presented here, not even the most recent one, has passed beyond the drawing board, and while it is in a sense refreshing to examine developments that failed to materialize, as a useful corrective to the usual preoccupation with describing, explaining, and exploring the controversies surrounding the great success stories in theme parks and heritage tourism, the nature of the project imposes on the author a more pressing need than usual to communicate its wider relevance to the reader.
The author's academic background is in anthropology and sociology, and her book is based on a decade's acquaintanceship with Port Royal, including a fieldwork visit lasting a month in 2001. She discusses the contested histories of the British Empire in the Caribbean, pointing out the tensions between Anglocentric and metropolitan agendas as opposed to those that emphasize the distinctiveness of local culture and the various negotiations between the local, the Creole, and the metropolitan, and the problem of how to deal with slavery and its legacy in cultures of commemoration and celebration. After introducing these questions, and relating them to the developing politics of postcolonial independent Jamaica after 1962, she leads the reader through a series of tourism development projects aimed at exploiting contrasting versions of Port Royal's past, discussing the political and cultural implications of the changing mix and the relationships between entrepreneurs, planners, and communities in the working out of debates on content, presentation, ownership, and consequences. She charts the changing emphases in the content of the various projects, which move broadly but not in a linear fashion away from commemorations of admirals, buccaneers, and the British Empire towards attention to the African diaspora and the distinctive nature of the local community. She discusses the problem, as she rightly perceives it, of tourism boosters who have searched for various ways to exploit Port Royal's historical connection to pirates. Such efforts, she points out, have completely failed to engage the interest of the locals. In addition, Anita M. Waters also addresses questions about how developers perceived members of the local Port Royal community--from a nuisance to be expelled and relocated, to an asset to be co-opted into the enterprise.
This is an interesting and thought-provoking study, but it has the air of being an article inflated into a book. Above all, it does not tell a convincing story about why Port Royal is important, within Jamaica or on the wider stage. There is no map, and it takes a while to understand the location of the settlement and its anomalous position, close to Kingston but for a long time difficult to access from the capital. The earthquake of 1692, together with the underwater ruins that silently commemorate it, provides a dramatic story; but it also brought an end to Port Royal's brief period of picaresque significance as polyglot hotbed of luxury and vice in the heyday of Captain Henry Morgan, whose iconic current association with a famous brand of rum is not mentioned. Apart from the sunken remains, which have featured prominently in some of the tourism development schemes while posing practical problems of access and amenity, little seems to remain of the Port Royal that existed before the devastating hurricane of 1951, and what there is appears neither distinctive nor attractive as anything beyond a local destination. There seems to be very little left to see. The author has not presented convincing reasons for this small settlement's apparent attractiveness as a site for tourist development proposals, although it is easy to see why they have achieved so little. The potentially totemic power of associations with "pirates," buried treasure, and sudden seismic disaster has failed to compensate for the lack of tangible, authentic relics on site, and the link with Horatio Nelson, famous in Britain as a naval hero of the Napoleonic wars, falls down in the same way.
Part of the problem is that the Port Royal site lacks direct connection with the most important themes in Jamaican history, whether viewed through a British imperial or a Jamaican lens, and this gives a disjointed air to the book's argument. As the author points out, "It is not easy to find Afrocentric histories in Port Royal" (p. 76). The slave trade, for example, developed after the earthquake of 1692, and was not associated with this particular site. Nor is there an identifiable association with other key aspects of Jamaica's history, such as the Morant Bay uprising and its ruthless suppression in 1865. Given the author's concern to explore Port Royal's tourism credentials in relation to themes in Jamaican history, it is surprising to find no mention, for example, of Catherine Hall's work, especially her Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination (2002), or that of Paul Gilroy, Alan Rice, and others on the "Black Atlantic." Nor has Waters engaged with Mimi Sheller's stimulating book Consuming the Caribbean (2003). As Esther Chapman's Pleasure Island: The Book of Jamaica (1951) shows, too, the main international tourism centers of the island have long lain elsewhere, and Port Royal is represented in this book as a place of distant memories, with the two-and-a-half pages devoted to it culminating in a couple of sentences on the current importance of its aerodrome. The absence of this book from the thin bibliography, and the paucity of references to guide books (as opposed to development plans) in the text, also suggests that an opportunity to provide fuller and more appropriate contexts for this case study has not been taken. This is a useful and thought-provoking book, but it leaves the reader with a sense of frustration at the failure to articulate Port Royal's relevance on a wider stage, and to establish the necessary context for the attempts to develop and represent it as a heritage tourism destination.
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Citation:
John Walton. Review of Waters, Anita M., Planning the Past: Heritage Tourism and Post-Colonial Politics at Port Royal.
H-Travel, H-Net Reviews.
September, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13575
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