Shayan Lallani Caribbean Cultural Encounters UC Berkeley TSWG 9 Oct 2020
The Tourism Studies Working Group
is pleased to present
"Caribbean Cultural Encounters
in Early-to-Mid-Twentieth Century Cruise Ship Tourism"
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And here are my questions from the Zoom text chat:
"Did you come across, by any chance, menus from individual cruising boats with smaller parties than large cruise lines - eg sailing and power boats - that might offer helpful contrasts and comparisons re approaches to your interpretation of tourist mediation in the Caribbean (eg Bohemian type cruising in the 20th century, hippy Greenpeace type sailing craft in the 1960s and 1970s - who may have also lived long-term in the Caribbean)?"
"Thank you, Shayan, for your interesting talk! (Am wondering further regarding my above questions, is the role of other kinds of cruise ship menus from ships which are schools - e.g. some Tall Ships - and with an educational mission, or Semester at Sea, or even historical reenactments (if these exist) … re teaching the mediation of touristic cultural encounters - and even as critical approaches to large cruise lines? (e.g. 'alternative cruising’ with paying passengers). (And in what ways, regarding my own research, could one reconstruct such large cruise line experiences in virtual reality eg here - https://twitter.com/hashtag/
(Oxford Ph.D. student Zhan Huang, online too:
https://www.anthro.ox.ac.uk/
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notes:
Cunard Line's Queen Elizabeth, 1950s.
Courtesy of the University of Liverpool, Cunard Archive. © 2017 Cunard.
Shayan Lallani, PhD Candidate
History, University of Ottawa
Friday, October 9, 4PM-6PM PDT
Zoom Link [click here]
Abstract:
Cruises were a means for wealthy Americans to encounter Caribbean societies in mediated ways. The ship, though traversing foreign waters, remained a luxurious and thus familiar atmosphere, complete with many home comforts and rendered an elite experience through the French-influenced fare on offer. Yet, cruise ship tourists also explored Caribbean ports of call wherein contact with sociocultural Others was much more conspicuous. This paper uses cruise menus to explore how the ship was rendered a luxurious space, as well as cruise travel guides and accounts to study how cruise passengers were asked to view foreign societies before their voyages, and how they encountered those cultures once they debarked the ship. It explores how cruise tourists toured foreign lands in ways that were ultimately sanitized. The familiarization of Caribbean cultures was accomplished by augmenting references to exoticism with references to American or European cultures, and especially through colonial symbolism. Thus, an otherwise foreign experience was rendered safe and palatable for American cruise tourists.
Speaker Bio:
Shayan Lallani is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Ottawa. His research explores how mass-market cruise lines in the American market produced cultural encounters through dining experiences in the late twentieth century. His articles have appeared in Food, Culture & Society, and the Journal of Tourism History.
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