Cruise Ship Diplomacy: Making U.S. Leisure and Power in the Anglophone Caribbean, 1900-1973.

摘要

This dissertation examines the impact of leisure travel on political, economic, and cultural relations between the United States and the Anglophone Caribbean from the early years of organized tourism through the early 1970s. I identify the ways in which the processes that enabled and encouraged increasing numbers of U.S. travelers to take Caribbean vacations worked in concert with the extension of U.S. power and shaped U.S. citizens' ideas about the West Indies. To understand the critically important interrelationships between Caribbean leisure travel, U.S.-West Indian economic and political relations, and changes in U.S. leisure culture, I examine: (1) the development of local and regional infrastructures that supported tourist travel; (2) the dissemination of images of and ideas about the Caribbean in U.S. media; and (3) the engagement of U.S. and West Indian policymakers and businesspeople with tourism as a method of development in the context of decolonization and economic liberalization. Materials have been collected from U.S. and West Indian archives, and published works including travelogues, travel guides, postcards, brochures, newspapers and popular magazines have been examined. In addition, I have used films, musical recordings, and television sources. This dissertation demonstrates that the United States' role in the twentieth-century West Indies was inextricably linked with the creation and expansion of mass tourism. While some have argued that official diplomacy and geostrategic considerations were the principle levers of change in U.S.-West Indian relations during the mid-twentieth century, U.S. citizens' long engagement with the West Indies as playgrounds in the United States' backyard shaped both elite and popular perspectives on the Caribbean. These perspectives informed decisions on questions of policy as well as tourists' leisure practices, producing the Caribbean vacation as an icon of U.S. consumer culture and enlisting tourists in the extension of U.S. power in the postcolonial Caribbean.