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Abstract
Oceans are the bearers of the narratives of voyages - of exploration, of the movement of populations and goods - that were and continue to be taken upon them. The cruise ships that ply them are potent symbols of the social meaning of oceans in the way they stage their relation to these narratives. This article aims to complement tourism studies perspectives on the cruise industry with an analysis of cultural texts that suggest that cruise ships and ocean liners are not simply instruments of neoliberalization or agents of the industrial North's symbolic and real appropriations of landscapes of the Global South; rather, these vessels function simultaneously as indicators of neocolonial situations and, more importantly, as reminders of a history that structures present relations between former colonizers and the formerly colonized in the Americas: the history of slavery and, as it concerns the ships and their 'cargo' specifically, the Middle Passage.
Keywords: ecocriticism, Edouard Glissant, Haiti, Martinique, Middle Passage, oceans, Patrick Chamoiseau, tourism studies
In August 2004, a Royal Caribbean cruise set off from Miami for a seven-day voyage through the Greater Antilles, with stops in Nassau, the Bahamas; Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas; San Juan, Puerto Rico; and Labadee, a beach town in northern Haiti. Whereas most Caribbean cruises aim to transport their passengers to an ahistorical space of oceanic/insular warmth, leisure and indulgence, this cruise purported to be different. 'Cruising into History,' as its organizers dubbed it, was promoted as an educational voyage that would, in the year of the celebration of the bicentennial of Haiti's independence, highlight the shining example of Haitian slaves who had risen up 200 years earlier and overthrown their white French masters. It would also provide financial support, mostly in the form of tourism dollars, to ordinary Haitians. Spearheaded by Ron Daniels, President of the Institute of the Black World in the 21st Century (IBW21st), and supported by former New Orleans mayor Marc Morial, the musicians Harry Belafonte and Hugh Masekela, the poet Sonia Sanchez, and the actor/activist Danny Glover, 'Cruising into History' was intended as a vehicle for African-American uplift and an expression of what the organizers insistently referred to as 'pan-African' solidarity (implying in this context Afro-diasporic solidarity). For all its stated good intentions, though,...