Postcolonial Nations, Islands, and Tourism examines how real and literary islands have helped to shape the idea of the nation in a postcolonial world. Through an analysis of a variety of texts ranging from literature to prison correspondence to tourist questionnaires it exposes the ways in which nationalism relies on fictions of insularity and intactness, which the island and island tourism appear to provide. The island space seems to offer the ideal replica of the nation, and tourist practices promise the liberation of leisure, the gaze, and mobility. However, the very reliance on the constantly shifting and eroding island form exposes an anxiety about boundaries and limits on the part of the postcolonial nation. In appropriating island tourism,…show more content… The first category of literature presents and analizes the internal challenges inherent to determining an ethnic identity in a decolonized nation. The second category of literature presents and analizes the degeneration of civic and nationalist unities consequent to ethnic parochialism, usually manifested as the demagoguery of "protecting the nation", a variant of the Us-and-Them binary social relation. Civic and national unity degenerate when a patriarchal régime unilaterally defines what is and what is not "the national culture" of the decolonized country; the nation-state collapses, either into communal movements, espousing grand political goals for the postcolonial nation; or into ethnically mixed communal movements, espousing political separatism, as occurred in decolonized Rwanda, the Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo; thus the postcolonial extremes against which Frantz Fanon warned in…show more content… It is suggested that by slowing African population growth, African societies had such a low population density that it limited their ability to engage in widespread trade, construct cities or engage in other activities that would have promoted economic development. It appears that as many as 24 million young Africans were removed from Africa as a result of the Atlantic trade and possibly another 12 million in the Middle-eastern slave trade. In addition, little of productive value was received by Africa in exchange for the slaves. Another impact was that the trade disrupted African inter-society relations, creating additional conflicts, wars and ethnic tensions.
Slavery may have also contributed to underdevelopment in Caribbean and Latin American LDCs by introducing a pattern of labor that resulted in elites focusing on export crops and resisting the introduction of new technologies that threatened their positions.
Some analysts doubt that the slave trade had a significant impact on underdevelopment today. They contend that the annual numbers of slaves exported was less than one percent of the population, whereas diseases annually killed almost ten times that amount per year. Western Europe lost a greater share of its population to emigration and it was able to