Tropical Whites: The Rise of the Tourist South in the Americas

Catherine Cocks, Tropical Whites: The Rise of the Tourist South in the Americas, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013, 284 pp.In this work on the emergence of tourism in the early twentieth century, historian Catherine Cocks examines how "the tropics" were transformed in the eyes of United States whites from a threatening area to the central locale for pleasure travel and physical reinvigoration. The author focuses on the cultural history of what she calls "the Southland", a transnational "archipelago of tropical beach resorts" in the Caribbean, as well as Mexico, Florida and California (p. 123). Tropical Whites joins a range of historical monographs on the social, cultural and political history of early tourism in the Caribbean.1 Cocks argues against previous interpretations which posit modern tourism as merely "the perpetuation of unchanging North American and European racism and imperialism" and ignore what she contends was its progressive role in the modernization of attitudes about race, sexuality and culture (p. 13). Although very few Americans travelled during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, given the high price of travel, these new visions of the tropics seeped into the wider culture via the likes of travel writing, advertisements, fiction and other texts. All of these, the author analyses in her work.The concept of "tropicality" has long been important in constructing the colonial discourse of geographic difference, casting the tropics as the "primitive" Other to the "civilized" North. As late as 1900, northern whites still perceived the hot and humid zones as places to avoid, offering them only moral depravity, disease, physical degeneration or death. The paradigm shift in US attitudes towards "the tropics" between 1880 and 1940 is the focus of this publication. Cocks notes how modern medicine and germ theory facilitated disease control while decoupling the once linked categories of "race" and "climate" in popular consciousness. Modern forms of transportation such as steamships and railroads allowed for rapid tourism and return home. Cocks agrees with other historians such as Frank Fonda Taylor that the network of fruit plantations in the Southland helped drive tourism with its transportation and facilities, as well as by projecting the image of horticulture's "mastery over nature". The voyages of the United Fruit Company's "Great White Fleet" led the way for the luxury Caribbean cruises which characterized the height of tropical tourism in the following decades.Travel to the tropics, Cocks suggests, held out the promise that wealthy northern whites could engage with the climate and the peoples of the southern lands without becoming vitiated or corrupted by their force. Indeed, they would be enhanced by this interaction, becoming "tropical whites" in the process. After the discovery of Vitamin D, for instance, physicians increasingly prescribed "phototherapy" as a treatment for a range of ailments. With sunshine a commodity to be sold in just the right amounts, Bahamas boosters insisted that Nassau "never becomes oppressively warm", while United Fruit promotional materials claimed that Jamaica had a "climate that is all you expect - balmy, salubrious, sunny but not hot" (p. 78). In the Southland, sunbathing arose as what the author terms "a kind of 'brownface,' a playful experiment in becoming nonwhite that . . . embodied a renovated relationship between civilization and nature" (p. …