Chapter 1: Tourism Chapter 2: Land Chapter 3: Work Chapter 4: Language, the Imaginary and Tourism Chapter 5: Race Chapter 6: Decontamination, Reparations, Health and Crime Issues Chapter 7: The Future of Vieques
Luis Galanes Valldejuli is professor of anthropology in the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Puerto Rico at Cayey.
The book tackles the difficult question of power relationships in a
tourist economy and describes the ways in which viequense language
and discourse is silenced within discussions on the island's
political economy. This case is illustrative of the continuing
contradictions at the heart of the US-Puerto Rico colonial
relationship. Valldejuli offers provocative parallelisms between
Vieques' current predicament and the Caribbean's historical
struggle with imperialism, which result in a situation where the
viequenses are left with limited resources to develop their agency.
* Islamic Studies *
Tourism and Language in Vieques documents the unfolding interplay
between development and language on a small island easily engulfed
by the hegemonic service economy of tourism. The voice of the
Viequenses is combative, yet strangely mock heroic and bound to
remain misunderstood, and therefore not listened to. In his very
readable book, anthropologist Luis Galanes Valldejuli ably
portrays, through in-depth ethnographic research and 'thick'
descriptions, how 'the complex, the messy, the "lived"' experiences
of the Viequense defy essentialist representations. He does so in
ways that acknowledge and remind us of the inherent, cultural, and
dynamic complexity and diversity that shuns dualist categories. --
Godfrey Baldacchino, University of Malta
Tourism and Language in Vieques is a very sensitively and
deliberately written ethnography on tourism, power, and language.
Valldejuli has collected the utterances of Viequense subalterns who
have been silenced in the face of tourism development not to 'give
them voice,' but to reveal the mechanics of 'epistemic violence.'
-- L. Kaifa Roland, University of Colorado-Boulder
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