Abstract
This paper draws on oceanic theory, Black studies, and musicological analysis to develop three critical concepts (seasickness, coercion, and oceanic postcoloniality) framing my dissertation research on music, labor, and affect in the contemporary global cruise tourism industry. As a music scholar, I deploy seasickness—a dysphoric condition resulting from the inner ear’s misalignment with its surroundings—as an organizing metaphor for how tourist subjects apprehend (or fail to apprehend) the modalities of racial capitalism buoying up the cruise industry. Seasickness figures prominently in my analysis of David Foster Wallace’s 1996 essay, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” Wallace’s nausea, I suggest, forms the tonal center of his critique, which is directed simultaneously at the industry’s imperative of “mandatory fun” and his fellow cruisers’ ability to ignore or rationalize the starkly racialized and transnational dynamic between labor and leisure onboard. Sonic coercion, embodied in both the blasting of the ship’s horn and the discursive maneuvers of Wallace’s cruisers, thus reveals itself as a compensatory technique by which the cruise industry’s postcolonial condition is drowned out (at least, for some) by the sounds of vacation . My discussion concludes with an analysis of the spate of viral cruise marketing that followed in the wake of Pharrell Williams’s 2013 hit, “Happy,” in which I demonstrate the ability of Western popular music to operate coercively within leisure capitalism, ultimately arguing that turning a seasick ear toward such techniques offers a crucial—if uncomfortable—platform for critique.
Presenters
Ken Tianyuan GeStudent, PhD Musicology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Critical Issues in Tourism and Leisure Studies
KEYWORDS
Cruise Industry, Postcolonial Studies, Black Studies, Music, Sound, Oceans/Water, Marketing
