Caribbean Inhospitality : The Poetics of Strangers at Home

Caribbean Inhospitality juxtaposes the Caribbean’s reputation for being hospitable to foreigners with the alienation of the Caribbean citizen-subject from nations they call home. Reading literary, cinematic, and digital texts, Natalie Lauren Belisle demonstrates that this inhospitality is institutionalized through the aesthetic, reproducing itself in the laws that condition belonging and membership in the Caribbean nation-state. 

The Caribbean has a global reputation for extending unparalleled hospitality to foreign guests. Yet local citizens express feeling alienated from the Caribbean nations they call home. Here, Natalie Lauren Belisle probes the relationship between these incompatible narratives of Caribbean life. Departing from tourist-centered critiques of the Caribbean’s visitor economy, Belisle instead gives primacy to the political life of the Caribbean citizen-subject within a broader hospitality regime. Reading literary, cinematic, and digital texts that traverse the Spanish, Anglophone, and Francophone Caribbean, Belisle interprets citizens’ estrangement through misdirected political deliberation and demonstrates that inhospitality is institutionalized through the aesthetic, reproducing itself in the laws that condition belonging and membership in the nation-state. Ultimately, Caribbean Inhospitality recasts the decay of nation/state sovereignty in the postcolonial Caribbean within the contours of neoliberalism, international relations, and cosmopolitanism.