Selling “Sites of Desire”: Paradise in Reality Television, Tourism, and Real Estate Promotion in Vanuatu

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dc.contributor.authorMcDonnell, Siobhan
dc.date.accessioned2019-12-10T18:50:53Z
dc.date.available2019-12-10T18:50:53Z
dc.date.issued2018
dc.description.abstractIn a continuum from early voyages of “discovery,” Pacific landscapes continue to be created through the visual representations and geographical imaginings that inform foreign desires. Just as early exploration narratives and paintings fashioned the Pacific as an exotic Eden peopled with alluring women, contemporary media manufactures Pacific landscapes as sites of desire. Beginning with the filming of the Survivor reality television series, this article explores how the visual representations and narrative tropes attached to Efate Island in Vanuatu were instrumental in the commodification of customary land as real estate, subsequently sold to expatriates for tourism resorts and residential housing. Television, tourism, and real estate images are not benign. In these images the landscape is rendered terra nullius—absent of local inhabitants and ripe for possession—enabling the neocolonial possession of Pacific landscapes by foreigners and the dispossession of local Indigenous inhabitants.
dc.format.extent24 pages
dc.identifier.citationMcDonnell, S. 2018. Selling “Sites of Desire”: Paradise in Reality Television, Tourism, and Real Estate Promotion in Vanuatu. The Contemporary Pacific 30 (2): 413–436.
dc.identifier.issn1043-898X
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10125/64960
dc.publisherUniversity of Hawai‘i Press
dc.publisherCenter for Pacific Islands Studies
dc.subjectcustomary land
dc.subjecttourism
dc.subjectreal estate
dc.subjectreality television
dc.subjectparadise
dc.subjectVanuatu
dc.subjectbikini
dc.subject.lcshOceania -- Periodicals
dc.titleSelling “Sites of Desire”: Paradise in Reality Television, Tourism, and Real Estate Promotion in Vanuatu
dc.typeArticle
dc.type.dcmiText
dc.type.dcmiStill Image

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TCP [The Contemporary Pacific], 2018 - Volume 30, Number 2