Take Me to My Paradise

Colleen Ballerino Cohen is a professor of anthropology and women's studies at Vassar College. She has written several articles and has produced three ethnographic videos on BVI tourism, festivals, and musical culture.

• Illustrations AcknowledgmentsA Note on Notes and NamesIntroduction: Take Me to My Paradise1. Tourism's Paradise: Historical Background2. Making Paradise as a Tourist Desti-Nation3. "Nature's Little Secrets": Marketing Paradise and Making Nation4. Cultural Negotiations: Race, Identity, and Citizenship5. Like Looking at Ourselves in a Mirror: Collaborative Ethnography in Paradise6. Stanley's Swing and Other Intimate Encounters7. Of Festivals, Calypso Kings, and Beauty Queens8. Performing Paradise and Making CultureConclusion: Technically, It's a CountyReferencesIndex

"Take Me to My Paradise makes a genuine contribution to the growing literature on tourism and on those societies which have become economically reliant on international tourism . . . the nuanced observations and analytical revelations are fascinating." - Cynthia Enloe (Clark University) "The British Virgin Islands tourist industry has constructed a space that meets the Western expectation of a Caribbean paradise, and Cohen focuses on how this construction affects the people who live there. She skillfully accomplishes this demanding task. Packed with useful information, this book offers the novel incorporation of the author's raw field notes which add immediacy to the narrative and give the reader insight into the vagaries of anthropological fieldwork."(Journal of Anthropological Research)