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2024-2025 Colloquium Series

Cultural Globalization at Sea: The Rise of the Modern Caribbean Cruise Industry

Shayan Lallani
Historian of Tourism and Globalization

Friday, January 24, 4PM-6PM PDT

Hosted on Zoom: [click here] *

Please join us for dinner and further conversation at the Great China Restaurant, Bancroft Avenue, Berkeley (6:15pm). RSVP required for dinner. Please e-mail graburn@berkeley.edu

*There is no password needed to join this meeting. However, please ensure that you are logged into your Zoom account before clicking on the meeting link.

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. It is argued 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 to themed onboard 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. Through these processes, companies produced cruise ships as metaspaces—enclaves in which tourists encountered easily digestible cultural representations—while simultaneously expanding metaspaces construction to ports as they gained economic and political power in the Caribbean, resulting in the erasure of cultural difference.

Speaker Bio
Shayan Lallani is a historian of tourism and globalization. His work has appeared in Globalizations, Food, Culture & Society, and Journal of Tourism History. His book project on the mass-marketization of Caribbean cruise vacations is currently under contract with the University of Illinois Press.



 
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