Whiteness, Weddings, and Tourism in the Caribbean ─ Paradise for Sale

This book examines myths of the Caribbean as paradise. These myths are used as a backdrop to market destination white weddings. The book is interdisciplinary and uses historical and contemporary visual texts to examine the way in which middle class white womanhood assumes a decorative, privileged, and elevated position within contemporary images of destination weddings in the Caribbean. To facilitate the notion of the Caribbean as paradise, the book argues that this production of luxury is highly dependent on the positioning of blackness as servitude. To this end, tourism marketing appropriates the Caribbean’s history of slavery; transforming the region into a site where whiteness can consume black labor as luxury.

Karen Wilkes is Lecturer in Sociology at Birmingham City University, UK. Her book chapter,From the Landscape to the White Female Body, was published in the edited collectionMediating the Tourist Experience (2013). Her journal article, Colluding with Neoliberalism, was published inFeminist Review in July 2015.