Imagining Neoliberal Globalization in Contemporary World Fiction by Michael Walonen

Author:Michael Walonen [Walonen, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Political Science, General, Gender Studies
ISBN: 9781351120449
Google: hJtYDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 40002377
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

Part of this “commodified spectacle” involves the sexualization and primitivization of black male bodies, which conditions the outlook of Peter and Bella, as evinced by their ownership of the “Black Dallie,” an eroticized nude statue of a black male that serves as a kind of double for Cliff in the text. Visiting the workshop of its sculptress, Bella describes Cliff standing among some unfinished sculptures of black figures as hanging “back with his half-born people” – symbolizing how he exists, in her partial imaginative configuration of him, as the objectified exotic, wholly corporal Other. Or as Jennifer Rahim puts it, as evinced by Black Dallie and Cliff, the island body becomes a consumer object for Northerners in Tide Running (14).

This state of things has been set up by earlier capitalist world-systemic dispensations and the politics of race that have legitimized them and structured their geographic distributions of the means of production. These precursors are placed in evidence when Peter and Bella take Cliff to a restaurant that was formerly a Native American settlement and then a plantation, where Bella reflects that

[l]ike in the rest of this beautiful island, the bitter taste of slavery is in the earth itself […]. A bile in people’s minds. Now tourism is the new trade, the new crop. But it still brings people who have to be served, white people expecting something in return for the Yankee dollar.

(Kempadoo 116)

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