On the Nervous Edge of an Impossible Paradise: Affect, Tourism, Belize

There are beastly forces in Belize. Forces that are actively involved in making paradise impossible. On the Nervous Edge of an Impossible Paradise is a collection of seven stories about local lives in the fictional village of Wallaceville. They turn rogue in the face of runaway forces that take the form and figure of a Belize beast-time, which can appear as a comic mishap, social ruin, tragic excess, or wild guesses. Inciting the affective politics of life in the region, this fable of emergence evokes the unnerving uncertainties of life in the tourist state of Belize.

Kenneth Little is Associate Professor of Anthropology at York University in Toronto. His research focuses on the analysis of society as spectacle, the critical turn in anthropology to the study of affect, social creativity, experiments in ethnographic writing and performativity.