Center for Mobilities Research and Policy

Center for Mobilities Research and Policy Drexel E-Repository and Archive (iDEA) http://idea.library.drexel.edu/ Drexel University Libraries www.library.drexel.edu The following item is made available as a courtesy to scholars by the author(s) and Drexel University Library and may contain materials and content, including computer code and tags, artwork, text, graphics, images, and illustrations (Material) which may be protected by copyright law. Unless otherwise noted, the Material is made available for nonprofit and educational purposes, such as research, teaching and private study. For these limited purposes, you may reproduce (print, download or make copies) the Material without prior permission. All copies must include any copyright notice originally included with the Material. You must seek permission from the authors or copyright owners for all uses that are not allowed by fair use and other provisions of the U.S. Copyright Law. The responsibility for making an independent legal assessment and securing any necessary permission rests with persons desiring to reproduce or use the Material. Please direct questions to [email protected] sjtg_365 189..203 doi:10.1111/j.1467-9493.2009.00365.x The new Caribbean complexity: Mobility systems, tourism and spatial rescaling Mimi Sheller Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, USA Correspondence: Mimi Seller (email: [email protected]) The Caribbean region is being respatialized, rescaled and reterritorialized in the face of contemporary processes of neoliberal development, shifting mobilities and spatial restructuring. Drawing on the field of mobilities research, this paper argues that new transregional approaches to spatial dynamics are needed to describe the complex, polymorphic, and multiscalar geographies in the neoliberalizing Caribbean. It first analyzes how new spatializations of Caribbean mobilities are part of larger transnational processes of urban restructuring. It then examines how neoliberalizing policies have promoted the ‘opening’ of once publicly owned infrastructures such as ports, airports, and telecommunications, contributing to a rescaling of Caribbean territoriality. Finally it considers how tourism mobilities associated with the cruise ship industry and private luxury property developments facilitate interlocality competition and outside access to the region while circum- scribing local access and mobility rights. The paper proposes a postcolonializing island studies that recognizes the complexity of contemporary Caribbean rescaling and the subtle ways in which modernized built environments and infrastructures of mobility and connectivity contribute to the weakening of island-state sovereignty, territorial integrity and democratic citizenship. Keywords: mobilities, tourism, offshore economies, neoliberalization, citizenship Introduction Contemporary Caribbean development rests on complex physical and informational mobility systems that constitute and transcend the region. These networked systems include transportation, passport and border surveillance systems that allow for (or prevent) tourism, migration and transmigration,1 licit and illicit movements of freight and goods by road, sea and air, transnational flows of money, capital and financial services, technologically mediated flows of information, communication and (some- times pirated) intellectual property, and the unpredictable movements of global threats to security and natural hazards (such as drugs, diseases, criminals or hurricanes). The Caribbean is a series of places in motion, with its islands especially stitched together by arriving and departing flights, the to and fro of cruise ships and private yachts, the flows of freight and ports, satellite dishes and high-speed Internet connections, monetary remittances and return migrants, taxis and mobile phone calls, smugglers and refugees. This paper examines the new spatial complexity that is emerging out of these island mobilities and the state rescaling that is associated with neoliberal restructuring processes in the Caribbean, with special attention to recent forms of supranational governance, open economies, and tourism development. Recent geographies of state rescaling and urban restructuring emphasize the histo- ricity of social space, the polymorphism of geographies, the dynamic restructuring of scale, and the continuous remaking of state space, urban space and, I would add, island space (see Brenner & Theodore, 2002; Brenner, 2004). Spatial analysis suggests that ‘capitalist expansion has [always] been premised upon the production and continual transformation of urban space’ (Brenner, 2004: 118; see also Harvey, 1989; Lefebvre, 1991), but also of far-flung non-urban spaces that are mobilized into metropolitan Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 30 (2009) 189–203 © 2009 The Author Journal compilation © 2009 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore and Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty Ltd 190 Mimi Sheller circuits of exchange. In particular, with the commercialization of sovereignty (Palan, 2002), so-called offshore economies are emerging in the Caribbean as ‘an “in-between” juridical realm where states are able or willing to apply only a certain degree of regulation’ (Palan, 1998: 637). The deregulation and privatization of these spaces has facilitated the flourishing of new forms of electronic financial services, new forms of tax-free low-wage export processing, and new forms of real estate and luxury property development, all of which are changing the territoriality of state sovereignty and, crucially, of citizenship and human rights. More dynamic spatial models of such offshore jurisdictions are needed to describe the multiple mobilities and ‘complex, polymorphic, and multiscalar regulatory geographies’ (Brenner, 2004: 67) that constitute neoliberalism in the Caribbean.2 Elsewhere I have discussed how the colonial Caribbean was generated out of flows of plants, people, ships, foodstuffs, technologies, travel narratives, visual images, and venture capital (Sheller, 2003). I have also explored how the modern Caribbean results from the multiple intersecting mobilities and immobilities generated by shipping routes, airline networks, communications infrastructures, and people and cultures on the move (Sheller, 2004a). Along with others working within the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller & Urry, 2006a), I have sought to show how: places are economically, politically and culturally produced through the multiple mobilities of people, but also of capital, objects, signs and information moving at rapid yet uneven speed across many borders, only contingently forming stable places (Urry, 2007: 269). This paper continues this investigation by examining how neoliberal economic deregulation and tourism development, alongside changes in the technologies and infrastructures of (im)mobility, are contributing to an ongoing rescaling and spatial restructuring of Caribbean states (also see related arguments in Sheller, 2007b; 2009). Since the late twentieth century the Caribbean has been buffeted by changing spatial divisions of labour within both agricultural and industrial production, by the (mostly) relentless rise of tourism, by the desire to promote high-tech and service industries, and by the emergence of new regulatory frameworks and development discourses associated with both postcolonial national independence and neoliberal global and local governance.3 A postcolonializing urban/island studies would better recognize the multiple spatialities and temporalities of neoliberalizing restructuring processes, the complexities of contemporary Caribbean rescaling, and the subtle ways in which local and global processes are spatially and temporally connected through the governance of mobilities and immobilities. This paper aims to lay the conceptual groundwork for such an analysis and to delineate some of the transregional empirical data that indicates the changing spatializations of the region. Following Peck and Tickell (2002) I use the term ‘neoliberalizing’ to emphasize both the processual and performative aspects of neoliberalism as a ‘strong discourse’ (Bourdieu, 1998: 95), and the differentiated and context dependent nature of that process as it unfolds in specific places, including various Caribbean states. I do not offer an in-depth case study of a particular instance, but rather an overview of the region as a whole and the multiple neoliberalizing currents that are contributing to contemporary spatial restructuring and rescaling throughout the region. Such processes are refolding local places into transnational infrastructures of metropolitan mobility and capital flow, while often excluding local populations (and even governments) from control over and access to their own territories. In the first section, I introduce recent mobilities theory as a lens for viewing Caribbean island space as a crucial element within global urban restructuring processes, involving splintering and The new Caribbean complexity 191 concentration, connectivity and disconnectivity. In the next section I turn to the ongoing neoliberalization of state spaces and regulatory regimes in the Caribbean, showing their contribution to rescaling the relation between urbanism, state sovereignty, and island space. Finally, I describe trends in tourism development, focusing on the liberalization of the once publicly owned infrastructures of ports, airports, and telecommunications, the creation of offshore

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