Rethinking ‘resilience’: Indigenous wellbeing and romanticised inequality in post-COVID tourism campaigns

Much commentary posited COVID-19 as an opportunity to reset the global economy and reimagine a more equitable and resilient tourism industry, especially for small island developing states that had been reliant on tourism prior to the pandemic. Offering a critical analysis of tourism campaigns for the Pacific island nation of Fiji before and after border closure, this chapter questions such ‘reset’ optimism. Prior to 2020, place-based advertising for Fiji invoked the neoliberal language of ‘wellbeing’ to repackage colonial tropes of the ‘happy native’ and Pacific island timelessness. When the borders closed, these stereotypes were reframed as ‘resilience’, casting Fijians as naturally good-humoured amid crisis, inured against economic hardship due to a presumed cultural trait of non-materialism, and ‘happy’ to serve Western tourists upon their return. We argue this narrative extends colonial tropes, re-entrenches the country’s reliance on the vagaries of international tourism, and thus romanticises and reinforces local and global inequalities.