This chapter connects Black Atlantic and Indian diasporas in the Caribbean while also noting differences between them. Although a particular aspect of diaspora theory suggests a nostalgic longing for the original homeland in a dual home–host binary, the authors discussed here prefer not to ground themselves in a bounded ethnonational identity tied to a specific location. Rather, the very concept of diaspora is open-ended and multifaceted in their works. Even as they retain memory of and loyalty toward their several homelands and hostlands, they are also critical of the experience of continuing displacement, gender violence, and racism. Their embrace of different and evolving horizons avoids the melancholia associated with diasporic identities. Against the troubling narratives of their sense of unbelonging, they articulate a disjointed, provisional, productive sense of subject formation that is a critical counterpart to exclusionary discourse based on nationalist jingoism and nostalgic idealizations of the homeland.

The essay begins by discussing the debatable relationship between narratives of Black Atlantic chattel slavery and discourses of contemporary slavery in a global context. While some scholars are wary about conflating two different historical experiences, others see a useful link between past slavery and current trafficking. Uwem Akpan’s story “Fattening for Gabon” invokes the earlier trajectory of chattel slavery to the Americas but insists on a specific, local history of enslavement within Nigeria that locates it within a growing literature revealing West African internal involvement in past and present slave trade and trafficking. By restricting a global trafficking route to one origin in Nigeria, Akpan emphasizes local conditions of poverty and societal breakdown that lead to child trafficking in Nigeria and other African countries. I argue that even if Akpan ultimately borrows from the conventional slave narratives of the Black Atlantic, his attention is not solely or even primarily on the Middle Passage but on the First Passage when Africans captured other Africans to bring them to the coast for trade. Past and present are brought together in a continuum rather than as the rupture of the Middle Passage.

The essay surveys a broad selection of literary responses to tourism, which plays a significant role in the Caribbean. While the tourism economy is not inconsequential, the authors in focus tend to portray the commercialization and commodification of the archipelago, often marketed through the fantasy of paradise islands, in a negative light. Targeting the ‘leisure imperialism’ of tourism ideology, they trace an unsettling legacy in which the violent past of sugar and slavery survives in the smiling servitude of industrialized tourism. The superficial discourse of love and peace, the hedonism imposed on the sunny tropics, the supposedly willing sycophancy of the locals eager to please wealthy tourists are all dismantled through humour and dark satire to reveal a bleak underside of drugs, sex, exploitation, antipathy and social rot. However, calls for responsible, ‘slow’ tourism more beneficial to the locals hope that the industry may be ethically operated.