Description
Despite its increasing popularity and multiple contributions to the global economy, contemporary research on cruise ship tourism remains understudied and relatively uncritical. This paper aims to fill that gap by critically analysing how three major cruise lines, including Carnival Cruise Line (CCL), Royal Caribbean International (RCI) and Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL), virtually position the local histories of postcolonial states in their online advertisements. Focusing on the Caribbean archipelago, I argue that CCL, RCI and NCL work to temporally displace and nostalgically remember the region’s colonial past within their online marketing, in order to make those destinations appear more paradisical and marketable to prospective passengers. By downplaying the violent activities of European colonialism and erasing those more recent movements of Caribbean independence and emancipation, cruise lines work to reproduce, reinforce and normalise the notion that the Global South needs to just ‘move on’ from colonialism, as if to suggest that legacies of European empire have no impact on the world in the present day. These findings demonstrate that cruise lines are henceforth eager to distance themselves from issues and legacies of European colonialism, because these stories and encounters are deemed ‘unsellable’ to paying tourists, but also in an effort to conceal the role that the cruise ship industry has played in the continued exploitation and appropriation of the Global South.
