Page 153 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

138 Francio Guadeloupe

It is the high noon of Carnival on this 37 square mile rock, inhabited
by 70,000 souls, entirely designated a Freeport, which receives over 1.5 million
tourists annually. Saint Martin is an overseas department of France, while
Sint Maarten constitutes an integral part of the Dutch Kingdom (see
Daniel 2006 and Oostindie and Klinkers 2003 on the political constitu-
tions of the nonindependent French and Dutch Caribbean). This is the
only place in the European Union where France and the Netherlands bor-
der each other, and as a sign of goodwill border patrols are nonexistent.
There is no need for such measures since tourism and European subsidies
guarantee that these islanders are spared the endemic poverty that charac-
terises much of the politically independent Caribbean. They are not vying
for political cessation or engaging in anti-colonial politics.
Though the island is divided between France and the Netherlands,
there also exists the supranational imagined community of SXM (read
St. Maartin) that encompasses both sides of the island. This imagined
community ideally includes the 80 different nationalities—whereby new-
comers outnumber the “natives” four to one—that reside on the island.
The wealthy North American and European hoteliers, East Indian busi-
nessmen, native political elites, Chinese grocers, native civil servants and
professionals, West Indian, Asian, and metropolitan working classes—an
enumeration emulating the economic hierarchy on the island—must be
embraced by this SXM.
If the tourist industry is to be unperturbed by the exclusivist fantasies
of ethnic difference, which is a catastrophe for islands that sell them-
selves as hedonistic heavens, operations of all-inclusive community build-
ing must be promoted. In other words, orchestrated imaginations of
community must surpass the nativist nineteenth-century New World
political nationalisms—the United States, Haiti, and Spanish America—
that Benedict Anderson (1991) and C. L. R. James (1963[1938]) have
written about. These collectives were imagined in relation to external
and internal outsiders: European colonial powers and discriminated
“minorities” and “majorities.” As a mode of imagining community, these
New World inventions continue to form the template of First and Third
World nationalisms.

On SXM, however, the self-other dichotomy of political nationalism is
transposed to the economic realm, since political independence is not
sought after. The Other is reconfigured as those who are accused of jeop-
ardizing the livelihoods of the islanders by promoting exclusivist notions of
community. As the island’s prosperity is based upon being open to the out-
side world, the entire population is enticed to behave as actual stakeholders
in the capitalist enterprise of promoting the island as a place of fun and
sun. This enticement is forwarded through the media.