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ABSTRACT
Carnival, Royal Caribbean, and Norwegian—the largest cruise lines today—emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, advertising their packaged vacations to a growing audience of middle-class Americans interested in encountering cultural difference. This article argues that, beginning in the late 1970s and continuing into the following decade, the cultural representations that these mass-market companies leveraged drew on Eurocentric understandings of Caribbean societies, homogenizing those countries despite attempts to showcase difference. These companies also reimagined global cultures Eurocentrically in onboard themed experiences. As both a product and agent of globalization, the mass-market cruise industry selectively deployed referents in ways that increased the appeal of cruising as escapism while reducing the likelihood of cultural confusion and reassuring passengers of their comfort. Through these processes, companies produced cruise ships as metaspaces while simultaneously expanding the construction of metaspaces to ports as they gained economic and political power in the Caribbean. This process resulted in the erasure of cultural difference.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks Mishall Lallani for her valuable suggestions. The author wishes to acknowledge that parts of this article appear in a book under contract with University of Illinois Press.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Pilcher (Citation2017) is concerned with the globalization of Mexican food, a process that entailed the redefinition and deployment of the cuisine for different purposes over time. For the role of American expats in this process, see pp. 163–188.
2 On touristic metaspatiality, see Hottola (Citation2011).
3 ‘Let Yourself Go! To the Caribbean of Your Choice’, Miami Herald, 11 October 1981, Newspapers.com Databases.
4 While acknowledging that Mexico is not formally in the Caribbean, cruise lines marketed Mexican cities bordering the Caribbean Sea as part of Caribbean itineraries.
5 ‘Let Yourself Go! To a Mexican Fiesta’, News-Press (Fort Meyers, FL), 8 November 1981, Newspapers.com Databases.
6 ‘Norwegian Line Tries Mexican Motif’, Miami Herald, 21 December 1981, Newspapers.com Databases.
7 For the commodification of Maya culture by the tourism industry, see Little (Citation2004).
8 Such lectures were not limited to NCL. They were, by this time, common practice in the cruise industry. See Saunders (Citation1978, pp. 57–58).
9 ‘Norwegian Line Tries Mexican Motif’.
10 ‘Cruise to Maya Magic of Mexico's Yucatan’, Miami Herald, 18 April 1982, Newspapers.com Databases.
11 St. Kitts, for instance, invested US $64 million in 1981 towards government development projects, including building a harbour for large cruise ships, Winder (Citation1981). Cruise ship tourism grew in the Dutch Caribbean during the mid-1980s because oil refineries, the primary industry, were closing. In turn, Curacao businessmen funded a US $50 million revitalization of Curacao's capital historic centre to make it more attractive for tourists. The first cruise ship arrived in the Aruban port of Oranjestad in 1979, just a few years before Exxon closed its refinery, Treaster (Citation1985; Thomas, Citation1988). Montserrat was making efforts to create ‘an organized system of serving cruise ship passengers at the port’ in 1987, while St. Lucia's construction of the Pointe Seraphine port resulted in expanded berthing capacity and thus appealed to more cruise ships. Soon thereafter, more shops and restaurants were being built at Seraphine. In that same year, Curacao attempted to make the cruise port more attractive for passengers by adding shops and information booths to the cruise terminal, ‘UPDATE ON THE CARIBBEAN’, 15 November 1987, New York Times, ProQuest Databases.
12 ‘Display Ad 70’, New York Times, 20 October 1986, ProQuest Databases; ‘Display Ad 75’, New York Times, 10 May 1985, ProQuest Databases.
13 ‘Memorandum—Business Mission to Caribbean: Boston’, Robert Anderson Ambassador to the Dominican Republic Subject File Caribbean Basin Initiative (3) Box 27, Folder ‘CBI Seminars—April 29—May 4, 1985’, Gerald R Ford Presidential Library & Museum, Ann Arbor, MI. ‘Latin American Program Working Papers—The Caribbean and the United States: Problems and Prospects’, Robert Anderson Papers, 1965–1995 Box 26, Folder ‘Caribbean’, Gerald R Ford Presidential Library & Museum, Ann Arbor, MI.
14 ‘Caribbean Basin Imitative – 1983’, Hearing Before the Committee on Finance United States Senate Ninety-Eight Congress, First Session on S. 544, 1983, HeinOnline Databases.
15 ‘International Competitiveness’, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Taxation and Debt Management of the Committee on Finance, United States Senate, One Hundredth Congress, first session, 16 November 1987, HeinOnline Databases.
16 ‘$83 Million in Loans for Improving Transportation in Latin America and Caribbean Region’, Finance & Development 18, June 1981, 4, ABI/INFORM Collection Databases.
17 ‘$83 Million in Loans’.
18 ‘Display Ad 327’, New York Times, 2 November 1987, ProQuest Databases.
19 Ibid.
20 ‘Display Ad 327’, New York Times, 2 November 1986, ProQuest Databases.
21 Norwegian Cruise Line, Voyages, 1988. Tourism studies scholars have argued that travel companies, and the guidebooks and brochures they produce, mediate encounters between tourists and locals. See for instance Young (Citation2009). Guidebooks shape the tourist gaze, and the shaping process can begin even before tourists ever step foot in the destination. NCL's booklets are examples of the same.
22 Norwegian Cruise Line, Voyages, 1988.
23 Norwegian Cruise Line, Voyages, 1988.
24 Norwegian Cruise Line, Voyages, 1988.
25 Norwegian Cruise Line, Voyages, 1988.
26 For the same reason, the economic impact studies commonly commissioned by cruise lines to justify their practices in the Caribbean were often inaccurate.
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Shayan S. Lallani
Shayan S. Lallani received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Ottawa. His research examines how mass-market cruise lines in the US-Caribbean industry simulated cultural encounters for a growing middle-class passenger base in the late twentieth century. His work has appeared in Food, Culture & Society, Journal of Tourism History, and Games and Culture.