Performing for Hollywood: Coloniality and the tourist image in Esteban Ramírez’s Caribe/Caribbean (2004)

Abstract

This article problematizes US-Costa Rican cultural and ideological relations through an analysis of the film Caribe / Caribbean (2004) by Esteban Ramirez, positing that the film unconsciously invites an international audience to colonize it via the tourist gaze. Beginning by considering Ramirez’s anti-imperialist stance within the film’s plot which underscores the sovereignty of the Central American nation, I argue that these aims are undone through the exoticization of space and place. This article therefore goes on to analyse the ways in which the tropical image of the nation is seen to be internalized by the film, as well as considering the hegemonic Hollywood tropes of ethnicity and gender which are mimicked and performed.