Sun, Sea, and Sound: Music and Tourism in the Circum-Caribbean - Hardcover

As an attempt to address the gap in scholarship on music and tourism, the book is appropriately broad in scope while still maintaining its basic theme. (Hannah Rogers, Latin American Music Review)

All the essays are exhaustively researched, and taken together they cast light on a relatively understudied element of Caribbean popular music: its transmission and evolution in the culture of tourism. The collection references all of the main players, singers, and songwriters in Caribbean styles ranging from reggae to rara. Discussions of tourism, the expatriate influence, sex, and spirituality are of particular value. (D. V. Moskowitz, CHOICE)

Music and tourism, both integral to the culture and livelihood of the circum-Caribbean region, have until recently been approached from disparate disciplinary perspectives. Scholars who specialize in tourism studies typically focus on issues such as economic policy, sustainability, and political implications; music scholars are more likely to concentrate on questions of identity, authenticity, neo-colonialism, and appropriation. Although the insights generated by these paths of scholarship have long been essential to study of the region, Sun, Sea, and Sound turns its attention to the dynamics and interrelationships between tourism and music throughout the region. Editors Timothy Rommen and Daniel T. Neely bring together a group of leading scholars from the fields of ethnomusicology, anthropology, mobility studies, and history to develop and explore a framework - termed music touristics - that considers music in relation to the wide range of tourist experiences that have developed in the region. Over the course of eleven chapters, the authors delve into an array of issues including the ways in which countries such as Jamaica and Cuba have used music to distinguish themselves within the international tourism industry, the tourism surrounding music festivals in St. Lucia and New Orleans, the intersections between music and sex tourism in Brazil, and spirituality tourism in Cuba. An indispensable resource for the study of music and tourism in global perspective, Sun, Sea, and Sound is essential reading for scholars and students across disciplines interested in the Caribbean region.