The copy: Let’s assume I’m an island.
I’ve got a casino that looks like /
the Taj Majal.
Golf courses men adore.
And if skin divings your pleasure. I’ve got that too. The best in the world.
I’m Grand Bahama Island just 2 1/2 hours from Times Square and that’s what I call conveniently located.
700 Bahama Islands.

This print ad appeared in United States magazines sometime in 1968. It was produced by the Interpublic Group advertising agency, at the time one of the largest such firms in the world. The blatant gendering and sexualizing of the islands is obvious. Almost too obvious.

I find the ad unsettling for other reasons. What you have to remember is that these were the first attempts from a representative black government in the Bahamas to create its own imagery to promote itself. I need to go back and check, but I can’t imagine that the ads that came before were any more demeaning.

A question: how much of this was the government’s input and how much was ultimately dictated by the foreign advertising agency?

This quote from Ian Strachan’s Paradise and Plantation, although analyzing a very different artifact from a more modern era, seems oddly appropriate… “The land is feminized. The woman awaits a companion, and her virtual nudity is a sign that she is willing to be sexually penetrated. She is already being visually consumed. She seems to be asleep. She must therefore be awakened just as the land must be stirred from its inertia, its unprofitableness, by the conqueror’s will.”

He feels though, that I am too far behind to finish the thesis this semester. To put where I am in perspective, I’m working on chapter 4 out of 5 right now, I have a total of 150 pages so far, and I have a month and a half to have this and another chapter done. And of course, I haven’t even started to edit. This, my friends, is called pushing it. Financially, another semester is nearly impossible for me to manage. My funding is finished and there are no guarantees for next year.

I might try to analyze how I got here, but frankly, I don’t see the point. I have actually been working as well as I ever have. It’s just that these things take time.

Right now, I’m working on chapter 4 and 5. I have a nice little framework in place for both of these chapters and I’m going to have to go ballistic in the next two weeks to give myself a shot. The task ahead is improbable. It is not yet impossible. And the difference between the two states is blurring swiftly. Chop Chop!

I’m thinking of posting the text on the site to get feedback from who ever will read it. We’ll see. The chapter is entitled “A Brief Social History of Tourism in the Bahamas 1740 – 1967″ I’m trying to give background information for the Fergusons of Farm Road. It’s impossible to understand what is going on in the scripts without first understanding their context. Chapter three is tentatively title “A Brief History of the Bahamian Courtesy Campaign 1955 – 1970.” To the best of my knowledge no one has written about this before. I’m pretty sure there is no Bahamian literature on it. The most I see is a sentence that describes “a friendliness campaign” that happened in 1970, this thing goes quite a bit deeper than that. (Well at least I think so anyway )

Good news to report to on what will happen with all of this when I graduate. I got a grant from the Cable Bahamas Cares foundation to get the scripts published. I hope to do a great deal more than just publish them too. Big plans. We’ll see if they become reality soon enough. First the thesis!

I’ve also fixed up the website a bit, as regular visitors will know. (Who, pray tell, are these regular visitors?) It now looks good enough and works well enough that I can post-pone the major surgery that I had intended for it. The essays are gone from the page list and they live in their own little parallel universe away from the blog posts. The home page has gotten a nice little picture. (With unintentional symbolism no less, thorny problems, and a thorny fence!)

I still need to fix up the blog page and get some air on the page, and I think something is wrong with the sidebar in archives view… I guess the main thing I want to do is to get a projects page going, one that outlines my evolving Fergusons work and let’s you know what’s going on. I guess this blog will still serve that purpose.

When I started this dot info site, I didn’t realize how much content I had to put up here. And it looks like much more to come…

Found this little link on the web and found it interesting that other tourist resorts are dealing with similar issues to what the Bahamas dealt with all those years ago.

Representations of Caribana violence in the Toronto print media

Research Project, April 10, 2007

Group members:

Shane Bentham

Franciene McLeod

Edward Minnis

Nassim Shirvani

The festival of Caribana is marking its 40^thanniversary in the city of Toronto this year and it has become quite the cornerstone of a typical summer of fun within the city. This is deservedly so because, coming from modest origins, Caribana is now the largest outdoor festival in North America, and generates well over 200 million dollars in local revenue. It attracts over two million people from all over the world, to the point where hotel rooms are often booked out a year in advance for the next parade (Trotman 177). 

Caribana is often pointed to, usually by the government and the festival organizers, as a symbol of successful multiculturalism, of what is possible for a diverse city like Toronto. Despite this however the annual festival and parade has a perceived aura of fear and imminent violence. The Toronto Star reported that a staff sergeant ”addressed some 30 officers about to start their shift [at Caribana], he told them that [it] was not quite the festival they had heard about. He suggested they had nothing to fear.” (Barahona A9) Is Caribana really so dangerous that the police who manage the parade are scared for their lives and require a pep talk just to walk the streets? Or is this merely the effect of the mainstream media that wishes to paint this predominantly black cultural festival with a negative brush? This essay will argue that the Toronto media goes out of its way to represent Caribana as a violence plagued bacchanal despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

I spoke to my supervisor last week and I’m supposed to have a draft of the second chapter to him by the 27th. Yes, it is a little tight but I really need to get the rubber to the road on this writing thing. Since I came back from Nassau I’ve been circling my work like a vulture waiting for the appropriate moment to strike. The time is now.

Very big Fergusons news to report: Audio has been found. At ZNS Freeport of all places. Turns out that the entire series was replayed in Grand Bahamas in the late eighties and all of those old reel-to-reel tapes were shipped over from ZNS Nassau. In the shipping back there was one box that was accidentally left behind. And lucky for us too as it seems that ZNS Nassau went and threw away everything in their archives nine years ago. Kind of defeats the purpose of having an archive don’t it?

I have a gut feeling that the tapes are there in Nassau. But I’m going to have to get some kind of authorization to look through the place myself. They may be right that nothing is there, but I would believe them more if they got out of their seats and actually looked.

And finally, I hope to get my interview / conversation with Ian Strachan’s radio show “The Nation Today” from February 2nd 2009 on this site soon, along with my little JCN TV moment from “Dialogue” with Etoile Pinder. As soon as I get the files / CDs / DVDs I’ll put em up.

Has Wendy’s started selling ‘conch snacks’, you ask? How can an American fast food chain ever possibly hope to be considered Bahamian? While I agree that the idea may sound shocking, I believe that because of its importance in the lives of Bahamians today, it is possible to say that Wendy’s is just as Bahamian as Bamboo Shack. But before I explain my position, allow me to clarify a point: when I say Wendy’s, by extension I’m referring to the other major fast food restaurants such as Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC), and McDonalds. It naturally follows that by referring to the Bamboo Shack I can be making reference to any well-known Bahamian Restaurant, like Castaways, Dirties or The Palm Tree.

The first objection any red-blooded Bahamian would raise about the above claim would be the menu. Obviously the food that these fast food restaurants serve is not considered traditional “Bahamian cuisine”. You cannot, and probably never will be able to, go into a Wendy’s and order a conch snack, or go to McDonalds and order a dish of sheep-tongue souse. However, the questions I ask are these: is the food served the only test of Bahamian-ness’? Just because something is not indigenous to the Bahamas, can it be considered Bahamian? Are there any other factors that contribute to something’s being considered Bahamian, or a part of Bahamian culture?

For the purpose of our discussion, it would help to have a clearer definition of “culture”. Patricia Glinton-Meicholas in her essay “Uncovering the Bahamian Self”, defined culture as “the sum of the historical and physical experiences of a people, and how they interact to create endemic group attitudes and behaviors.” What this means is that culture is a fusion of a peoples’ history and how they as a people have coped with that history. Or, put another way, culture is created by people surviving and reacting to their environment. So, despite what Bahamians in general may think “their culture” is, it really is a dynamic fusion of past and present that does not remain static. It is constantly evolving taking into account the complete environment that makes up the modem Bahamas and our reaction to that environment, including the general lifestyles that we as a people lead.

When did the first “Courtesy Campaign” begin in the Bahamas? This was Pindling’s “Look Up, Move Up, The World is Watching campaign.” I just need a date and some details…

An answer to the question is January 4th 1968. However this is the answer to the question of when did the first PLP Courtesy Campaign begin. It turns out the UBP launched their own Courtesy Campaign in July 1961.

So, bad Bahamian service did not suddenly begin on January 10th 1967. In fact there is an even earlier courtesy campaign that started in 1955. This thing has deeper roots than I thought.

Update: The slides have now been corrected.