Abstract
For Miss Grace, a Belize beast time arrived with “the flood”. In its wake were tourists. It felt like the end of the world. There were signs. The endless darkening days of heavy wet storm. A tropical low pressure system pressing in like the weight of a gloomy atmosphere agitating social life. A raging sea. Unhealthy tempers. Then the beach dissolved under impossibly green skies the color of sick and snakes. “Me, I could feel the Beast comin’,” Grace said. Clearer in that moment than she ever was. When the darkness fell. She. Feel. House. Floating. Across the village. She, holding on. Things on the surface of churning water that she wants no part of. “God say we had it comin’,” she said. This paper evokes the manner in which Grace feels the signs of “the beast” in the trauma of a deadly storm that destroyed her village leaving only anguish and hoards of tourist investors in its wake. I take up the question of an alternative economy pondering Grace’s beast time encounters as vibratory conjurations, open transductions, contingent as in some quality of an accidental discovery of feelings. I turn to the power of crazy connections through which Grace’s stormy encounters became a make-believe space that composed itself as a dense entanglement of sensation, attention, and matter. I re-imagine the evidence of Grace’s beast time affective economy as a dynamized force, co-constituting enactments of trauma and curiosity: attempts to find room to maneuver in a new tourist Belizean real.
Presenters
Kenneth LittleProfessor Emeritus, Anthropology, York University, Canada, Ontario, Canada
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Critical Issues in Tourism and Leisure Studies
KEYWORDS
NATURAL CATASTROPHY, MONSTERS, TOURISTS, LOCAL RESPONSE, CHANGE, AFFECT, BELIZE
