Producing and preserving Park Island: Transforming St. John, United States Virgin Islands into a leisure-oriented space.

Synergistic relationships between the Virgin Islands territorial and U.S. federal government, tourism and real estate interests, and a national park have driven the creation and maintenance of St. John, a twenty square-mile island in the U.S. Virgin Islands, as a leisure-oriented space. The island is known to many as Park Island. It is as Henri Lefebvre explains an abstract space, which erases distinctions in an attempt to appear homogeneous. The appearance of homogeneity is its strength, a unified front promoting a safe, harmonious, adventurous, paradisiacal, natural leisure-space. The building of Park Island has been an active process intertwining bricks and mortar, images, discourses, social relationships, domination and abstraction of space, and contradictions that emerge in lived space. The dramatic transformation of the population on St. John over the past fifty-years highlights how important social realities can impact what happens in a place. Park Island relies on the ability to control how people (locally and extra-locally) can and do talk about and represent it through powerful discourses. Park Island is a discursive formation as well as a lived, leisure-oriented space. Knowledge about St. John is passed along by those in authority and replicated by those with an interest in profiting from Park Island as a leisure space (e.g., one of paradise, luxury, harmony, natural wonder). This becomes truth for the many who listen. The chapters are dotted with examples of how people can and do speak about the island and how this has influenced ability to profit from it. Examples also illuminate the ways in which the contradictions in space can result in what Lefebvre calls counter-attacks---resistance to Park Island. Finally, the dissertation shows how Park Island has increasingly become a racialized and class-oriented landscape. The production and preservation of St. John as Park Island has been particularly generous to those associated with privilege, especially white privilege and elite and wealthy individuals from all parts of the world, including native Virgin Islanders.Ph.D.Cultural anthropologyRecreationSocial SciencesUrban planningUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/126690/2/3276159.pd