Paper short abstract:

This paper tracks the life of tourist ephemera in Belize as affective intensity: seductive lures that rub up against the transitory nature of a local world gone wild for tourism. Tracking the life of stuff, I gauge the impacts ephemera has as an emergent force of potentiality and panic in Belize.

Paper long abstract:

This paper tracks Belize ephemera in a manner that pays special attention to the generative forces and materializations of tourist clutter. Tourist encounters with stuff like postcards, advertising brochures, ticket stubs, and beer coasters evoke the sensations of the feverish and the transitory. This stuff is the mess and muddle of travel. It attracts instantly, flashing up as transient impact. It creates an affective surge as it pumps out potentials of desire, before it piles up in the corners of tourist attention, spent. It is excessive stuff that is also the stuff that once shouted its presence and function as it flashed by as dream world enticement, even as it ends up scattered across hotel rooms, washed up on beaches, or found at the bottom of suitcases like fossils emanating "radioactive" traces of life from another time and place. Using an "evening in paradise" when the Belize Jewels, a group of calendar boys, entertained tourists at a beach bar, this paper follows the flow of beer coasters as advertising material around which the shifting impulses of "the good life" grew vibrant as paradise desires. More generally, I am interested in the life of tourist ephemera in Belize as affective intensity: seductive lures that rub up against the transitory nature of a local world gone wild for tourism. Tracking the life of stuff, I gauge the impacts ephemera has as an emergent force of potentiality and panic that conjures the piled up dialectics of "profane illuminations" in Belize.