Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.13.1.0161
• Pages: 161-163
• Published date: 01 July 2021
• Date: 01 July 2021
• Author: Connor Harney

booK reVIeWS 161

IJCS Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals www.plutojournals.com/ijcs/

Jocelyne Guilbault and Timothy Rommen (eds), Sounds of Vacation:

Political Economies of Caribbean Tourism (Durham, NC: Duke University

Press, 2019), pb 234 pp. ISBN 9781478004882.

Reviewed by Connor Harney

Connor Harney is a History PhD Candidate at the University of North Carolina

at Greensboro

In their introduction, the volume’s editors begin with the question: “why

does the tourist site and class remain an inauthentic, unauthorized, or other-

wise spurious subject?” (p. 9). As an outsider to the particulars of tourism’s

political economy, this inquiry proved useful in understanding and placing

Sounds of Vacation within the larger field. According to Guilbault and

Rommen, tourism and the accompanying “sounds of vacation” are often

ignored for a number of reasons, among them: the focus on work over leisure

in political economy, vivid visual aesthetics associated with vacation and the

music’s characterisation as kitsch.

Over the course of volume, its contributors answer the initial question

through an examination of how capitalist power dynamics operate on “social

scale” and in “musical production”, along with the link between political econ-

omy and “the notion of hospitality by and through music and sound” (p. 9). To

narrow their scope of investigation and concretise this more abstract goal, the

volume’s scholars all focus on a particular kind of tourism – the all-inclusive

resort. As islands of leisure in a sea of work, these hedonic temples testify to the

monotony of daily life under late capitalism and the need remove oneself from

it. But beyond their appearance as pleasure palaces for Western professionals,

these all-inclusive resorts have within their walls a hidden world of work, one

characterised by similar “industrial rhythms” to those that make up the daily

lives of those seeking refuge from without.

Looking to uncover this world, the authors take up the task of looking at

these social relations of work across different Caribbean locales including the

Bahamas, Sint Maarten and Saint Lucia. With its roots in the sounds of slaves

and late colonial tourist spectacles, many of these national musical landscapes

are haunted by the spectre of colonialism. However, if the ghosts of colonialism

prove so difficult to exorcise, it remains to be seen why Puerto Rico and Cuba

were not included among those chosen for study. As a current colony of the

United States, one facing the continued deprivation of colonial underdevelop-

ment, it seems a missed chance to compare colonial and post-colonial sound-

scapes alongside one another. Cuba would have provided another interesting