We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
CANNIBALS IN PARADISE: PERPETUATING AND CONTESTING CARIBBEAN ISLAND STEREOTYPES IN FILM.
- Authors
POLUHA, LAUREN MADRID
- Abstract
The Caribbean islands have enthralled the European imagination since the advent of colonization in the region. As literary and visual depictions of the Caribbean circulated throughout western Europe, a set of enduring myths about Caribbean island geographies and inhabitants developed, including an association with the paradoxical concept of "Paradise." The region has been portrayed in equal parts as being Edenic and serene, inhabited by peaceful, indolent people and as wild and threatening, home to primitive man-eaters. Rooted in European political, economic, and religious motivations, these stereotypes were propagated via countless "ethnographic" reports and fictional adventure stories. Centuries-old myths of Caribbean cannibalism have been especially resilient and continue to appear in mainstream Euro-American media. As a result, indigenous Kalinago and Garifuna communities throughout the Caribbean and Central America are still working to overcome these malicious characterizations. Drawing on the discursive analytic framework developed by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (1994), this article situates current stereotypes about the Caribbean within colonialist discourses of the past five centuries, and contextualizes them within ongoing socio-cultural narratives. My analysis is couched within a comparison of two filmic representations of Indigenous Caribbean people and geographies: Walt Disney Pictures' Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006), which employs the full gamut of negative stereotypes about Indigenous Caribbean people, and documentary filmmaker Andrea E. Leland's Yurumein: Homeland (2014), which seeks to dismantle these same stereotypes and to highlight Indigenous Caribbean historical narratives and identities. By analyzing the ways these two films engage with longstanding Euro-American historical narratives about Caribbean geography and Indigeneity, the article speaks to cinema's potential to perpetuate or contest stereotypes of historically marginalized peoples and places, to foreground or disregard Indigenous voices and experiences.
- Subjects
PIRATES of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (Film); YURUMEIN (Homeland) (Film); LELAND, Andrea E.; VERBINSKI, Gore; INDIGENOUS peoples of the West Indies; CANNIBALISM in motion pictures; STEREOTYPES in motion pictures
- Publication
Post Script, 2018, Vol 37, Issue 2/3, p96
- ISSN
0277-9897
- Publication type
Film/Television Criticism