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Selling "Sites of Desire": Paradise in Reality Television, Tourism, and Real Estate Promotion in Vanuatu

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Selling Selling "Sites of Desire": Paradise in Reality Television, Tourism, and Real Estate Promotion in Vanuatu Siobhan McDonnell The Contemporary Pacific, Volume 30, Number 2, 2018, pp. 413-435 (Article) Published by University of Hawai'i Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cp.2018.0033 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/700786 Access provided at 15 Oct 2019 05:29 GMT from Australian National University Selling “Sites of Desire”: Paradise in Reality Television, Tourism, and Real Estate Promotion in Vanuatu Siobhan McDonnell Visual representations and narrative accounts of Pacific landscapes mat- ter. Long-established ideas of the Pacific as paradise are not empty tropes; rather, they are instrumental in the ongoing recolonization of Indigenous landscapes by foreigners. Beginning with the experience of the filming of Survivor: Vanuatu—Islands of Fire in North Efate, located just twenty- five minutes from Port Vila, this article describes how the television series resulted in a rapacious demand by expatriate investors to lease customary land. Building from the filming of Survivor, this article explores how real estate and tourism campaigns in Vanuatu and elsewhere in the Pacific cul- tivate foreign desire in ways that both motivate and enable the possession of Indigenous landscapes. Pacific real estate and tourism campaigns offer visions of paradisiacal, empty landscapes that function as playgrounds for white people. By reproducing the narrative tropes that frame the foreign imaginary of the Pacific, the images of real estate and tourism campaigns create a cultural loop in which Pacific landscapes become, once more, saturated with desire. Visual representations enable the colonization of space, which is not only “about soldiers and cannons . but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings” (Said 1993, 7). Ideas of paradise have ani- mated foreign imaginings of “exotic” landscapes for hundreds of years. Colonial expeditions imagined paradise as a kind of New World treasure trove ripe for exploitation. In this way, paradise became linked to the “‘long’ modernity of the capitalist system, implicated in the discourses of material exploitation and colonization” (Deckard 2010, 2–3). From the sixteenth century, the rhetoric of paradise emboldened colonial ventures to find new “treasure lands” where European colonizers could extract The Contemporary Pacic, Volume 30, Number 2, 413–436 © 2018 by University of Hawai‘i Press 413 414 the contemporary pacific • 30:2 (2018) raw materials and slaves (Deckard 2010, 9). These ideas also provided the motivation for the exploration of islands in the Pacific. Beginning with the first expeditions of James Cook, written accounts of voyages of “discovery” worked alongside images produced by art- ists who participated in these expeditions, with the result that the Euro- pean imagination was fueled by visual images of “dusky maidens” (see Tamaira 2010). Materials from the Cook voyages are laden with eroti- cized images of Polynesian women (Jolly 1997a, 100; Tamaira 2010). With these images, the process of colonization through imposed imagin- ing had begun. In a continuum from the early voyages of discovery, Pacific landscapes continue to be created through visual representations and geographical imaginings (Harvey 1973, 2006), which inform foreign desire. Consider- ing the social imaginary means considering how ideas of places are cre- ated and fashioned in ways that in turn create agency (Appadurai 1995). Sharae Deckard highlighted how the paradise trope shows a historical and continuing relationship with both the history of colonization and “its perseverance as a fantasy in late capitalist modernity, now operat- ing within the discourses of tourism and the postcolonial exotic” (2010, 1). Writing of images of Tahiti through time, Miriam Kahn commented, “Tahiti acquired its perceived value through the use of imagery depicting pastoral landscapes of late-eighteenth-century paintings, virile men and seductive women in Hollywood films, postcards of white-sand beaches, blue lagoons, and smiling Tahitians, and now Internet images of the same. Through the manipulation of these signs and symbols, value becomes externalized, objectified, commodified, and deeply desired” (2014, 153). Advertisements for real estate and investment, cultural tourism, and voy- euristic travel through media—whether a nineteenth-century novel, post- card, film, documentary, photographs, or “reality” television series— result in the Pacific being constructed as an idealized utopian paradise. Like the images of Tahiti described by Kahn, in Vanuatu, visual images of landscapes are not esoteric; rather, they are potent and everyday rep- resentations that consciously refashion ideas of a place. Using the experi- ences of the filming of reality television, as well as the images deployed in the entwined sectors of tourism and real estate, this article describes how the cultivation of foreign desire has resulted in the large-scale leasing of customary lands across the Vanuatu archipelago, but most extensively on the central island of Efate. With a landmass of 899.5 square kilome- ters (347.3 square miles), Efate Island hosts the capital city of Port Vila mcdonnell • selling “sites of desire” 415 and a population of 78,721 people. Statistics from 2010 suggest that 56.5 percent or 121.5 kilometers of coastal Efate is under lease (Scott and oth- ers 2012, 2). Here, as elsewhere in Vanuatu, reality television, tourism, and real estate advertise the commodification of place as paradise and in the process enable the possession of the landscape by foreigners and the dispossession of local inhabitants. Unpacking these images reveals the politics and fiscal realities that operate in the context of global capitalism to create visions of “paradise,” thereby obscuring the tensions caused by tourism and land sales. North Efate as a SURVIVOR Playground North Efate is a region that stretches along the coastline of Efate Island roughly from Tuktuk Point in the south to Samoa Point in the north. From a mountainous, volcanic inland the landscape quickly descends down steep escarpments to the coast, through reefs to the deep waters of Havannah Harbour. Since the mid-2000s, the Lelepa people of North Efate have experienced the voracious leasing of large areas of coastal cus- tomary land. Much of this land has subsequently been subdivided and resold as small blocks of coastal beachfront estates to expatriate investors (mainly Australians and New Zealanders) as locations for houses. Some of the blocks of subdivided land have become commercial developments, and the coastal estate of Havannah Harbour is now the location of Vanuatu’s only five-star resort (aptly named “The Havannah”) as well as numerous smaller resorts and a scattering of restaurants. The story of this land rush in North Efate is entwined with the filming of the Survivor reality television series. In the mid- to late 2000s, North Efate hosted the filming of three versions of the Survivor series: the Ameri- can Survivor: Vanuatu—Islands of Fire, the Australian Celebrity Survivor, and the French Koh Lanta. The best known of these was the American Survivor: Vanuatu, with the season being filmed on location from 28 June to 5 August 2004 (Burnett and others 2004). Exploration of the Survivor “playground” allows consideration of the ways in which place is repre- sented to foreigners who enter the landscape of North Efate—either as contestants in the reality television series, or, subsequently, as purchasers of real estate.1 The Survivor television narrative involves a group of “adventurers” traveling from the “civilized” world to unexplored territory (Delisle 2003, 45–46). The first episode of the Vanuatu series opens with imagery of 416 the contemporary pacific • 30:2 (2018) the host Jeff Probst “conquering” Yasur Volcano (which is actually on Tanna Island). As the camera pans across Mele Cascades waterfall (back on Efate), Probst’s voice-over begins: We are . in the nation of Vanuatu in the South Pacific. It is a land with a fascinating history of cannibalism, where rituals like sorcery and black magic are still a part of daily life. As “adventurers,” the competitors (and audience) have landed into an exotic landscape captured by the alterative narratives of colonial encoun- ters. On the one hand, the game is portrayed as a kind of Treasure Island with money to be won. On the other, the host introduces the idea of dangers lurking for the competitors—a “Heart of Darkness” narrative, complete with cannibalism and black magic. A particular aesthetic is required for the backdrop in the Survivor series: a manufactured, picturesque landscape rendered terra nullius (an empty landscape free of claims of possession), so described to reference the Brit- ish colonial settlement in Australia that was based on the legal fiction that the continent was literally empty of people. The landscapes for the series are “nostalgically constructed as anachronistic space, as places where one may remember this lost history of simple living. Where, in effect, time has stood still” (Delisle 2003, 44). In the opening scenes of the first episode of the Vanuatu series, the camera follows the edge of Efate Island and zooms down to a yacht heading across the waters of Havannah Harbour with the competitors aboard before panning across vast areas of Efate and Tanna islands. These shots have been carefully manipulated so that the landscape is rendered terra nullius; only the host and
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