Book Review: "East African Hip Hop"

I feel embarassed saying how much I enjoyed this new book from anthropologist Mwenda Ntarangwi. It is not only a delight to read, it is that rare academic book that encourages the hungry reader to search for more information on the topic. Its chronicle of emerging forms of creativity and resistance among youth in East Africa is both inspiring and accessible. Ntarangwi sees local forms of "hip hop" emerging among youth in East Africa as both reflective of global processses of American cultural influence, and at the same time critical of the forces of economic globalization eroding the social and economic outlook of the masses of East African youth. He writes in the Preface, "Rather than seeing hip hop as a completely new cultural phenomenon in East Africa, one is better off seeing it as a window into the culture of change in East Africa's political, economic and social realities created by local and global processes."

Ntarangwi divides his book into five chapters, each dealing with a different aspect of hip hop's social impact in East Africa. Chapters' one and two discuss globalization and hip hop music. Chapter three is a discussion of gender and hip hop. Chapter four explores economic privatization and its impact on the livelihoods of East Africans. Chapter 5 is about hip hop and HIV/AIDS, and in Chapter 6 Ntarangwi offers some concluding remarks. This is not a straightforward history, but an ethnography of hip hop's social influence in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania.

Two things I especially loved about the book: 1) The way in which Ntarangwi centers each chapter around a song, song lyric, or artist that exemplifies his theme. 2) The stories which give a human face to his ethnography and show him wrestling with various dilemmas as an anthropologist in the field.

I've posted videos from East Africa's burgeoning hip hop scene before on this blog, and it seems to be enjoying a growing global spotlight. As I write this, the famous Tanzanian artist Profesa Jay is embarking on a US tour. Other big name Tanzanian and Kenyan hip hop artists have embarked on international tours. But instead of focusing on the "bongo flava" side of East African hip hop--the sugary sweet commercial R&B side to the scene--Ntarangwi focuses on lyricists like Profesa Jay and Ukoo Flani, whose social critique have earned them devoted fans but perhaps less in the way of commercial accolade. As a Prof. Jay fan, I particularly enjoyed Ntarangwi's analysis of Prof. Jay's "Ndio Mzee" (Yes, Elder), a brilliant send up of politicians and their empty promises, and its followup "Kikao cha Dharura" (Emergency Meeting), where the politician who had earlier made such extravagant vows is forced to retract them, stating that the people have unrealistic expectations of luxury. Ntarangwi takes the song apart to show how Profesa Jay critiques local corruption in the state machinery, while remaining aware how these local structures are caught up and in many cases dependent on a global structure of economic dependence.

I anticipate this book will become required reading in many an African Cultural Anthropology class, but it is also a valuable addition to the Hip Hop Studies canon. Furthermore, its clear and readable prose could be a great entryway for high school and college students to talk about issues of cultural and economic globalization through a discussion of hip hop lyrics. Hip hop provides a cultural vantage point that will enhance the local relevance of the discussion for many students, while at the same time making them aware that hip hop is no longer just an American phenomenon but part of a group of interlocking and overlapping global processes that affect their lives in important ways.

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Medieval Arab Writers on Africa: Abû Ûthmân al-Jâhiz: From The Essays, c. 860 CE

On the Zanj:

Everybody agrees that there is no people on earth in whom generosity is as universally well developed as the Zanj. These people have a natural talent for dancing to the rhythm of the tambourine, without needing to learn it. There are no better singers anywhere in the world, no people more polished and eloquent, and no people less given to insulting language. No other nation can surpass them in bodily strength and physical toughness. One of them will lift huge blocks and carry heavy loads that would be beyond the strength of most Bedouins or members of other races. They are courageous, energetic, and generous, which are the virtues of nobility, and also good-tempered and with little propensity to evil. They are always cheerful, smiling, and devoid of malice, which is a sign of noble character.

The Zanj say to the Arabs: You are so ignorant that during the jahiliyya you regarded us as your equals when it came to marrying Arab women, but with the advent of the justice of Islam you decided this practice was bad. Yet the desert is full of Zanj married to Arab wives, and they have been princes and kings and have safeguarded your rights and sheltered you against your enemies.

The Zanj say that God did not make them black in order to disfigure them; rather it is their environment that made them so. The best evidence of this is that there are black tribes among the Arabs, such as the Banu Sulaim bin Mansur, and that all the peoples settled in the Harra, besides the Banu Sulaim are black. These tribes take slaves from among the Ashban to mind their flocks and for irrigation work, manual labor, and domestic service, and their wives from among the Byzantines; and yet it takes less than three generations for the Harra to give them all the complexion of the Banu Sulaim. This Harra is such that the gazelles, ostriches, insects, wolves, foxes, sheep, asses, horses and birds that live there are all black. White and black are the results of environment, the natural properties of water and soil, distance from the sun, and intensity of heat. There is no question of metamorphosis, or of punishment, disfigurement or favor meted out by Allah. Besides, the land of the Banu Sulaim has much in common with the land of the Turks, where the camels, beasts of burden, and everything belonging to these people is similar in appearance: everything of theirs has a Turkish look.

Source.

Scanned by: J. S. Arkenberg, Dept. of History, Cal. State Fullerton. Prof. Arkenberg has modernized the text.

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Cheap Labor and Illegal Immigration in Muscat

Muscat Confidential has a great piece on how urban Gulf economies like Muscat are dependent on access to cheap labor from the Indian subcontinent, peep it:

OK. Lets say you are an Omani and you have a farm up the coast. What you do is apply for visa for say, 10 Bangladeshi farm labourers. You keep 2 of them for the farm, where they will live in a small hovel and work your farm all day. The other 8 you charge say, 500 - 1500 rials for the original visa plus 20 rials a month for their continued sponsorship and labor card, and release them to the wild. They then seek employment however best they can, doing the jobs described above. As their sponsor you pull in a nice lump sum up front (usually borrowed from family back home), plus get 160 rials a month for very little effort; they get to earn what they can and keep most of it. Truly entrepreneurial types can apparently pull in quite a nice bit of cash. Its a huge gimmick. Of course, some of that money will go to ensure you get the visas in the first place through people in the Ministry.

Click on the title link for the whole article, its well worth your reading.

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Islamic Liberation Theology (Book Review)

This is an ambitious and frusturating book which tries to chart a course for an "Islamic liberation theology" just as Gustavo Gutteriez and James Cone did for Christianity. Dabashi argues that the ideological division of "Islam and the West" no longer has any meaning for contemporary Islamic praxis. In fact this binary division has produced an Islamic politics of opposition to Western modernity, forcing Islamic ideologues and ideology into anti-democratic stances and revolutionary excesses which mirror or even at times outdo the worst totalitarian impulses of Western thought.

I found Dabashi's narrative interventions provocative, especially his exegesis of the life and work of Malcolm X (see his chapter "Malcolm X as a Muslim Revolutionary"), placing him into dialectical interplay with religious currents within Shi'a Islam. He also helpfully draws on Gutierrez's notion of a "historical pilgrimage" of religion in an effort to re-historicize Islamic heritage.

Unfortunately the book suffers from a lack of judicious editing and and all too often a-historic approach to contemporary issues. He inscribes categories like "the West" and "modernity", equating them at times with global capitalism, at times with the European Enlightenment, at times with the foreign policy aims of the US government collapsing hundreds of years of history into categorical oppositions. Perhaps it is the historian in me, but I found this weakened Dabashi's important arguments overall, making them far too easy to dismiss because there is insufficent attention given to problematizing the ideological weight they are asked to hold in his argument. Dabashi also veers randomly between theorization and historicization, getting sidetracked in a kind of academic word-goop which obfuscates the potential of his points. As soon as you think he is going to make a good, potentially transformative point, he veers off into generalities and post-modern language of a particularly useless nature. For example, he writes, "a whole new mode of resistance movement, neither ethnically nationalist nor religiously nativist, is now needed to confront the predicament of Muslim peoples at large." (164) The reader anticipates a description of what Dabashi thinks this mode might look like, but instead is treated to agnosticism: "It is useless to speculate what precisely the particular disposition of these modes of post-national and post-nativist resistance would be. A total distrust of ideological meta-narratives is by far the most critical feature of this emerging mode of resistance." (164)

So why is it useless to speculate on a mode of resistance that is already emerging?! I interpreted Dabashi's ambivalence and slippery language, as evidence of his desire that a transnational movement for Islamically based justice and liberation to emerge. (Malcolm X is very important in Dabashi's formulation of this and Dabashi's comparison between Malcolm X and Sayd Qutb is intriguing) But Dabashi cannot theorize about this supposedly emerging global movement because its actual existence as a historical trend is much more a matter of personal perspective than Dabashi cares to admit. The world may be global and Islam may be a global religion, but there are thousands of "imagined communities" within the global umma, and the ties which bind Muslims together are not necessarily any stronger than those which tie nations or cultures together. Furthermore, don't the bin Laden's and other globally wanted "jihadists" (whom Dabashi rejects as reactionaries) view themselves as instituting precisely the kind of transnational movement he claims Muslims need (minus that skepticism of meta-narratives bit)? Dabashi dreams of a global justice movement which will simultaneously resist global capitalism, Western modernity, and Islamist totalitarianism. But isn't this a bit much to ask of any one movement?

The tension the reader observes in Dabashi's stance is symptomatic of the gap between a "skepticism of ideological meta-narratives" and the will to power necessary to carry out any project of justice and reform in the real world. Dabashi like many intellectuals is skeptical of that will to power, seeing in it the seeds of the demise of both revolution and reform-minded projects. Yet without it, the impulse for Dabashi's "new geography of liberation" remain words on a page.

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Dr. Amin Alhassan: Giving Is An Act of Self Interest

Yes, yes and yes. Dr Alhassan lays it DOWN in this piece about the dangers and disadvantages of state dependence on foreign aid. Best of all, it is done in a way that is accessible and direct. The good doctor has given The Azanian Sea to reproduce a portion of her article, but do yourself a favor and read the whole thing, available in PDF format here. I hope this will help those of us in the West who are tempted to overcongratulate ourselves for the work we do in Africa. The point is not so much that your project, your spring break trip, or your 'mission' to Africa is 'bad.' The point is that its rarely as altruistic as you would like it to be. What makes it possible for so many 'well meaning Westerners' to go to Africa to teach, build wells, do the Peace Corps, etc. is the continuing dependence of African states on international aid.

excerpt from "Telescopic Philanthropy, Emancipation and Development Communication Theory" by Amin Alhassan

From Charles Dickens to Present
“Telescopic philanthropy”, as a phrase, was first used by Charles Dickens in his novel Bleak House some 150 years ago to poke fun at and critique what was then an English fascination and obsession with designing development projects to save Africa and Africans from poverty, and to usher them into a modern economy of production. In the Dickensian narrative, the story is told of a Mrs. Jellyby, a friend of John Jarndyce, who neglects her house and children and is obsessed with projects designed to save African in the Congo from poverty by teaching them how to grow coffee to enable them to earn an income. In retrospect, it is clear that what Dickens was describing was the genesis of what is now a global industry of state, non-governmental charities and celebrity acts of philanthropy to save Africa from itself. Dickens was noted for his journalism and the use of the novel as a means of social critique. His discussion of telescopic philanthropy is instructive because it allows us to understand the practice of international development as pre-dating the post-World War II Truman era. It also allows us to understand how international development framed as charitable interventions that northern developed countries do to global southern countries as acts that are tied to the domestic power politics of the so-called benefactor countries.

It is against this backdrop that I am motivated to argue that the problem with Africa is as much a problem of development as it is the troubling impact of international aid on the continent’s self-initiative. Evidently what I am aiming to argue is not about a global divide of technological haves and technological have-nots. The global divide that interests me is the global divide of benefactors and beneficiaries, that between donors and beggars, between philanthropist and objects of charity. The institution that is partly responsible for this global divide is the global media. As we have seen from Dickens, the attempt to save Africa is not new. Indeed, Susan Thorne’s (1999) provocative interpretation of 19th Century middle class formation in Victorian and Edwardian Britain makes the case that saving the heathens in Africa was always preferred to saving the heathens at home, and that this particular fascination with the distant other had a definite imperial logic. It is a logic that is still with us today....

If we remind ourselves that the original idea of international development assistance that the US invented was not about development of the Global South, but about developing a global instrument of soft power and containment (Samarajiwa 1987, Escobar 1995), then the epistemic commitment of development communication theory ought to question the language of help that characterizes international development. Much of the development communication literature of the past 60 years has been on how to become an effective handmaiden of this dubious re-invention of international diplomacy called international development (See Waisbord 2000 for a comprehensive statement of various theoretical, methodological and strategic commitments in the field).

Development communication theory as an area of inquiry needs to take into account the price the so-called poor pay when they get a clinic built, pipe-borne water provided or a school built through the altruism of the philanthropist, the gift giver, or the new missionary worker of international development. I want to use a recent EU decision to illustrate this point. In July 2008, the BBC reported that the European Commission had agreed to use one billion euros of unspent European farm subsidies to aid African farmers (BBC 2008). The BBC report, which showed a picture of an African farmer labouring a rice field, went on to quote European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso as saying “The impact of high food prices is particularly severe for the world’s poorest populations” and adds that without the EU’s assistance, the UN’s goal to reduce global poverty will fail. This European act of altruism, upon a second look, is not only a phantom one, but a Trojan Horse that is meant to purchase a highly needed strategic advantage for the EU in a growing global tide against EU and North American agricultural subsidies and how they negatively impact on farmers in the Global South. The price Africa will pay for getting the “spare change” of one billion euro dropped in its begging bowl is that it will lose a strong standing in making a case against the EU for subsidizing its farmers so that they can unfairly compete with Africans in a global food market. What the EU’s charitable gesture does against the discourse of fair trade and the fundamental illogicality of preaching free trade in Africa while maintaining farm subsidies in Europe is far more significant that any apparent altruism it might suppose. Here then is the point about giving being an act of self-interest.

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Ugandans Serve as Private Mercenaries in Iraq

Corporate globalization gone haywire

UGANDA/IRAQ: Why 10,000 Ugandans are eagerly serving in Iraq

by Max Delany, Christian Science Monitor
March 6th, 2009

Under a relentless equatorial sun and the gaze of her Zimbabwean instructor, Juliet Kituye quickly reassembles her AK-47. Next to her, a young man in a ripped red T-shirt discharges imaginary rounds at an invisible target.

On a disused soccer pitch in the suburbs of the Ugandan capital, Kampala, 300 hopefuls are being put through rudimentary firearms training. Many of the recruits are raw and their drills occasionally lurch towards slapstick. One trainee lets the magazine slip out of his automatic rifle and onto the red earth, someone else about turns right instead of left. All of them share the same dream, however: going to Iraq.

As President Barack Obama announces plans to withdraw US troops from Iraq, thousands of young Ugandans are increasingly desperate to be sent to the war-torn country. Already, the Ugandan government says there are more than 10,000 men and women from this poverty-stricken East African nation working as private security guards in Iraq. Hired out to multibillion-dollar companies for hundreds of dollars a month, they risk their lives seeking fortunes protecting US Army bases, airports, and oil firms.

The war in Iraq is the most privatized conflict in history. Since the invasion in 2003, the US Department of Defense has doled out contracts worth an estimated $100 billion to private firms. Covering a vast range of services from catering to dry cleaning to security, one in every five dollars the US spends in Iraq ends up in the pockets of the contractors, according to a report by the Congressional Budget Office. Increasingly these jobs have been outsourced to developing countries.

It is clear why the US contractors came to Uganda. As an impoverished former British colony, the country is awash with unemployed and English-speaking potential recruits. Its pliant government was an early member of President Bush's "coalition of the willing," and with a lingering 20-year insurgency, it also has a glut of experienced army veterans, who made up the initial contingent of Ugandans in Iraq.

More important, hiring Ugandans is cheap. Since the first Ugandans were sent to Iraq in late 2005, competition from other developing countries in Africa and the Indian subcontinent has seen the government cut the minimum wage from $1,300 to $600 a month. That compares with the $15,000 that one industry insider estimated an American guard could make each month. Nevertheless, competition is fierce, and for those Ugandans who land a job, Iraq can prove a bonanza.

Paul Mugabe is back in Uganda for a month. For the past year, the sinewy, nervous young man has been guarding the American Camp Diamondback at the airport in the northern Iraqi town of Mosul, and soon he will be heading to Baghdad.

"It's not like Uganda. You sweat and sweat and sweat," says Mr. Mugabe, a former soldier in the Ugandan Army. "It is the most dangerous place in the world. It's even worse than Congo."

With the money he's earned during those 12 months, back in his village Mugabe has built himself two houses, bought a bar, and increased the herd of cows his father left him to 30.

"You should see the size of my banana plantation," he smiles. When he returns from another year in Iraq, he should have saved enough money to cover a wedding and the traditional bride price needed to find a pretty wife, he says.

But despite his nascent business empire and hopes of love, the fact that he is putting his life on the line to help US companies make massive profits is not lost on him. "If I am earning $600 a month and these companies are making billions, it is not fair," he says.

For Uganda, however, another country's war on a continent far away has proved to be lucrative. "The Iraq opportunity brings in about $90 million dollars, whereas our chief export, which is coffee, brings in around $60 or $70 million a year," says the former state minister for labor, employment, and industrial relations, Mwesigwa Rukutana, now minister of higher education. That figure is mostly made up of remittances.

But domestic criticism has been fierce, with some equating the system to human trafficking or slavery. Reports of abuse, ranging from poor conditions and changeable contracts to sexual assault, have appeared in the media.

"Unlike in the past when there was the slave trade, no company comes here and recruits anyone against their wishes. It is willing worker, willing employer," Mr. Rukutana says. "If anyone thinks the conditions there are bad or that he is going to be exploited, no one is compelling him to go." Rukutana says that only one Ugandan has been killed in Iraq, while others say more have died.

If anyone understands some of the hardships of working in Iraq and the industry it's spawned, then it is Moses Matsiko. Mr. Matsiko has spent nearly four years working for a US firm in Afghanistan and Iraq. In late 2006, a convoy he was escorting through the town of Fallujah was ambushed. He was shot seven times but survived. Two American colleagues he was with were killed.

But far from shy away from the dangers of Iraq, Matsiko has embraced its opportunities. In 2007, he started his own company to train and send guards to Iraq and now has over 1,200 in the country.

"My experience in Iraq is that despite having been shot seven times, it is very great," he says. President Obama's withdrawal plans have cast a shadow of doubt over his future business plans. But that has just forced Matsiko to start looking opportunities elsewhere.

"If all goes well, then I hope to be sending people to Afghanistan in the near future," he smiles.

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Kiswahili Must Be Protected By All (Zanzibar)

ZANZIBARIS should honour Kiswahili, and take full responsibility of preserving the Isles culture instead of blaming the government or foreigners for any distortions, the Zanzibar Minister of Information, Culture, and Sports, Mr Ali Juma Shamuhuna, has said.

Responding to concerns raised by legislators during the two days debate on the ministry’s 4.4bn/- budget proposals for 2009/2010, the minister said there was no way Zanzibar could detach itself from the rest of the world to prevent global impact on their language and culture.

“The world is now a global village, and Zanzibar cannot isolate itself. Let us accept changes by taking what we think is acceptable in our society and leave out the rest,” Mr Shamuhuna said before legislators voted to approve his ministry’s budget.

He dismissed as baseless claims that his ministry had not done enough to protect the Isles’ Kiswahili dialect, culture, traditional dances, and norms.

Mr Shamuhuna argued that Zanzibaris, including legislators, should not expect the government to do everything for them. “If a son or daughter returns home very late in the night, how do you blame the government? Such behaviour needs parental commitments.”

The minister also said it was difficult for his ministry to protect Kiswahili without the commitment of people and leaders who, occasionally preferred to speak English, not Kiswahili, at official functions.

The Speaker of the Zanzibar House, Mr Pandu Ameir Kificho, interrupted during the debate by asking the legislators to stick to Kiswahili (without mixing it with English). Most of them however, could not.

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Do Muslims Have a Global Identity?

Do Muslims Have a Global Identity?

Picking up where Dr. John Voll left off with the idea of Islam as a 'special world system.'

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Zanzibar: Island Paradise, Islamic Society, and Tourist Destination Gone Wild

The first impressions of Zanzibar (at least if you come by the ferry from Dar es Salaam) are almost inevitably of the relentless activity of the dock; the crush of people—men, women and children carrying luggage, boxes, provisions of rice and fuel from the mainland, all trying to avoid being stepped on amidst the tangle. There are others waiting for their sister or brother, children or grandchildren to step off the boat and into their arms, smiling and laughing. Overhead the sky is clear, and the incredible beauty of this remarkable island engulfs the senses.
The stone buildings are set with intricate doors of carved wood, inscribed with family titles in Arabic and Hindi over the mantle. The centuries of cultural fusion are evident everywhere. Disembarking from the ferry, there are young Muslim students in their matching blue robes paying their respects to an elder on the street, and women in hijab walking on flat heels, their feet intricately tattooed with henna. Several guys wearing locks extend English greetings in passing. And amidst all the rush, negotiating their overloaded frame packs through customs while haggling with the waiting taxi drivers, are the tourists.
Zanzibar is a tourist economy. Once a center of clove production for export worldwide, the island came to rely heavily on tourism after the clove economy collapsed in the 1980s. As soon as my friend and I disembarked, we were greeted with a great many men, both taxi drivers and tour guides, who wanted to know if wanted to go on the spice tour, or swim with the dolphins, or buy some paintings. Tourism is quite literally the lifeblood of this 97% Muslim society.
The following day, as we wandered through groves of banana trees (mg’omba), stands of lemongrass (mchai mchai) and pepper vines (pilipili manga) on the spice tour, I wondered aloud: “how could a place so beautiful come to be stained with so much blood?” There are ghosts in my head of enslaved Africans, mixed Shirazis, and the Arabs and Indians killed in the revolution of 1964.
Zanzibar is a country grappling with the clash of cultures, inequities of class and race, as well as the effects of globalization, including an economy dependent on mostly European tourists. Along the beaches and in restaraunts, I saw plenty of evidence that this old colonial mentality had not been broken, but simply glossed over; for example, the most prestigious hotel in town, the Africa House, was the former headquarters of the English colonial country club. At the bar overlooking the Indian Ocean, an all white clientele is served by an African service staff.
The name Zanzibar comes from two Persian words, ‘Zanj’ meaning black, and ‘bar’, meaning coast. It should be no surprise that despite what many tour guides on the island told us (‘the first people to settle here were either Arabs or Persians’) the indigenous people of Zanzibar emigrated there around 1000 A.D. from the African mainland. They were known as the Hadimu, who settled primarily in the South, and the Tumbatu, who lived in the North. After this initial migration, a wave of traders from Persia and the Persian Coast arrived and intermarried with the Hadimu and Tumbatu. Their offspring became known as the Shirazi and they would figure prominently in the emergence of Zanzibar as a hub of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean.
We visited several monuments dedicated to enslaved Africans, but I still wondered if the formerly enslaved had gained any foothold in the society, especially since the revolution of 1964. That revolution led to outbreaks of violence and the confiscation of the property of many large landowners, mostly of Arab and Indian descent. Given voice by a political activist from Uganda, John Okello, who was also a member of the Afro-Shirazi Party, the revolution galvanized the African population of Zanzibar, especially the poor. Their impetus proved so powerful that a similar uprising in Dar es Salaam had to be put down by President Nyerere, with help from the British. Nyerere then shrewdly moved to federate the island within the union of Tanzania, an arrangement which continues, uneasily, to this day.
But the revolution, though it may have acted as a social and psychological force to redress the imbalance of land and business ownership, could provide very little in the way of comprehensive programs with which to implement the desired changes for the long term. However I did observe some positive features. We toured one farm which was cooperatively owned by nearly 70 families, although according to them, most of the revenue they bring in was from tourism, and not food and spice production. Zanzibar’s food and fuel are shipped in large tankers that dock well off the coast of Stone Town.
There have been intermittent outbreaks of violence since the revolution; some of these killings were in retaliation for the revolutionary government’s seizure of land. In fact, the first president of the new Peoples Republic of Zanzibar was assassinated in 1972, and the current president, Amani Karume, is his son. It made me wonder: how does one absorb or avoid the inevitable backlash to a revolution by those deposed from power? And how does one use those instruments of power now in your hands (i.e. property, farms, weapons, manufacturing centers, and natural resources) to the benefit of all the people? Further still, what cultural programs are most effective for instilling the values of collective work, pride, and self-reliance in a people who have been trained in the opposite mentality by colonial oppression?
I wondered too about the role of Islam in Zanzibar. The profiligate waste and easy promiscuity of beach tourists ran counter to the disciplined and familial devotion I observed in the Muslim society of Zanzibar. I did not have time to probe further into the coexisting presence of these contradictions, merely to scratch the surface of an observation demanding deeper analysis. Nor did I have time to explore the current state of Afro-Arab relations. The picturesque beauty of this island and an economy geared towards fulfilling the elaborate tropical fantasies of a European elite, can stymie such analysis. But the effects of globalization demand a deeper look at this idyllic, troubled island.

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