"If I see another palm tree, I will have a conniption!": Re-presenting Hospitality Landscapes in Jamaica

Abstract

...Indeed, almost from the inception of tourism industries on the islands, hoteliers, colonial administrators, and local white mercantile elites (re)created or tropicalized many aspects of the islands precisely in the image of these representations. They physically transformed areas of the islands through planting campaigns or cleanliness drives, in efforts to make the islands appear as they did in photographs—orderly, picturesque, and tropical. Krista A. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque, Objects/Histories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 40. This thesis re-presents the image of the tropics at the site of the hotel, a “space where ideals of the picturesque tropical landscape were re-created in miniature” (Thompson 2006, 1). To do so, it draws upon the vernacular landscape of the Jamaican yard, embracing its public-private spatial logic and botanical diversity, to propose a hotel landscape that renders visible the lifeways, natural heritage, and the people of the island.