PhD Thesis by Shayan S Lallani, PhD
Carnival, Royal Caribbean, and Norwegian—the most profitable cruise lines today—emerged between t... more Carnival, Royal Caribbean, and Norwegian—the most profitable cruise lines today—emerged between the late 1960s and early 1970s, as the elitist leisure ocean travel industry attempted to recover from economic downturn. These mass-market lines targeted an American middle class that increasingly had the desire and financial means to travel. They secured much of this untapped market by creating packaged vacations that responded to the needs and tastes of a middle-class clientele. Drawing on cruise advertisements, newspaper articles, ephemera, industry documents, travel writing, and memorabilia books, this dissertation analyzes how these three companies used cultural and geographic referents to produce cruise vacations, responding to an increased consumer interest in cultural sampling as an accruement of economic globalization. Findings suggest that cruise ships offered their owners a space to arrange simulated interactions with global cultures—a practice that soon extended to Caribbean cruise ports as these companies gained the market power to influence encounters there. This complex collision of global cultures was advanced by a goal to offer passengers opportunities to discover new worlds. However, many of the cultural representations displayed on cruise ships were pastiches—essentializations drawn from popular media forms and based in Eurocentrism. These were meant to be entertaining, not accurate, representations. Nevertheless, as themed environments gained momentum, these cultural forms helped to transform ships into destinations in their own right—a process through which cruise lines produced a captive audience to siphon passenger spending from the Caribbean. At the same time, cruise lines leveraged their mediating power and economic influence to hide from passengers the supposed poverty, crime, and disease at Caribbean ports, and even the mundanities of daily life there, while increasingly installing mechanisms to appropriate spending from those who chose to debark the ship. These processes intensified as the decades advanced. This study thus finds that cultural homogenization did not result in an immediately apparent reduction of difference, because difference was profitable and central to the mass-market cruise industry’s advertising strategies. However, the surface-level cultural heterogeneity that cruises offered was reduced through a homogenizing vision that balanced novelty with passenger comfort, engagement, and convenience in support of corporate profits. The resulting cultural production process was not suggestive of glocalization, but rather a new phenomenon meriting further research.
Peer-Reviewed Articles by Shayan S Lallani, PhD
Globalizations, 2024
Carnival, Royal Caribbean, and Norwegian—the largest cruise lines today—emerged in the late 1960s... more Carnival, Royal Caribbean, and Norwegian—the largest cruise lines today—emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, advertising their packaged vacations to a growing audience of middle-class Americans interested in encountering cultural difference. This article argues that, beginning in the late 1970s and continuing into the following decade, the cultural representations that these mass-market companies leveraged drew on Eurocentric understandings of Caribbean societies, homogenizing those countries despite attempts to showcase difference. These companies also reimagined global cultures Eurocentrically in onboard themed experiences. As both a product and agent of globalization, the mass-market cruise industry selectively deployed referents in ways that increased the appeal of cruising as escapism while reducing the likelihood of cultural confusion and reassuring passengers of their comfort. Through these processes, companies produced cruise ships as metaspaces while simultaneously expanding the construction of metaspaces to ports as they gained economic and political power in the Caribbean. This process resulted in the erasure of cultural difference.
Games and Culture, 2022
This article argues that advancement in the MMORPG Runescape is connected to virtual performances... more This article argues that advancement in the MMORPG Runescape is connected to virtual performances of colonial exploitation. It places in geographic and temporal context various societies represented in Runescape by historicizing in-game cultural representations. Thereafter, it is asserted that players partake in virtual iterations of colonialism to advance their accounts. Analysis is grounded in four case studies exploring the themes of exploitative archaeology, colonial cartography, imperial diplomacy, and resource extraction. Each example represents opportunities for in-game progress. In connecting the virtual advancement of user accounts to performances of colonialism, it is argued that Runescape reproduces historic colonial projects in which European powers commodified other societies to advance their own economic and cultural agendas. Through this analysis, the article seeks to develop a guiding framework for the study of MMORPGs as replicating Eurocentric colonial encounters.
Food, Culture & Society, 2019
This article analyzes how mass-market cruise lines mobilize food, laborers, and built environment... more This article analyzes how mass-market cruise lines mobilize food, laborers, and built environments to offer passengers cosmopolitanism with the purpose of maintaining a unique business model. It is argued that while companies target a growing demand for culturally immersive dining experiences, they do not seek to offer complete immersion in any one culture but cosmopolitanism through a combination of multiple themed establishments on a mobile platform. Culinary themes are installed using labor and built environments, for instance through the placement of visual and material culture in eateries. While some onboard dining experiences are themed around the cultures of nations on the ship’s itinerary, many evoke international cultures. In studying how mass-market cruise lines as mobile spaces of containment combine both international and localized dining experiences to offer the “world on a ship,” scholars of tourism can better understand how touristic companies produce cosmopolitanism at destinations.
Journal of Family History, 2018
This article uses oral histories to examine how migration affected the gender dynamics of foodwor... more This article uses oral histories to examine how migration affected the gender dynamics of foodwork carried out by late post-war Italian immigrants in Toronto. Culinary gender roles remained preserved as narrators journeyed to Toronto. However, by the twenty-first century when national discourse emphasized a multicultural Canada—the climax of the shift toward culinary pluralism—the narrators each embodied a range of food masculinities and femininities. They also described other motives to do partake in culinary labor that cannot be categorized by the traditional binary. A new paradigm that accounts for the experiences of migrants encountering the homogenizing forces of multiculturalism is needed.
Journal of Tourism History, 2017
Before the mid-twentieth century, cruises were largely the preserve of elites. However, by 1970 t... more Before the mid-twentieth century, cruises were largely the preserve of elites. However, by 1970 there was a dramatic shift toward a predominantly middle-class customer base; this change generated a need to revamp menus to satisfy the tastes of a new type of client. The mass-market cruise lines that dominate the modern era of cruising—from 1970—increasingly offered passengers cuisine marketed as exotic—in ways that evoked ethnic or geographic 'Others'. Companies used food as a way of mediating encounters between passengers and foreign cultures. Marketing plays a key role in determining the place of a dish in the familiar/exotic binary. In mediating cultural encounters, cruise lines demonstrate how they want passengers to conceptualise racial, social, and cultural Others. Today, cruise ships contain ethnically themed foods, spaces of consumption, and culinary service. Cruise lines offer these immersive ethnic themes to tourists on platforms that are constantly mobile, resulting in a fundamentally unique business model. In performing this combination, companies encourage tourists to immerse themselves in as many different cultures as possible, though in expedited ways that are inherently and intensely mediated.
Research Notes by Shayan S Lallani, PhD
Journal of Tourism History, 2018
Various collections Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library contain ... more Various collections Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library contain documents about the historical marketing of travel and tourism. Also available are personal accounts from travelers about their journeys abroad. This overview highlights select collections that historians of tourism can use to examine how companies attempted to market their services and destinations on offer to prospective clientele; it will also discuss, though to a lesser extent, documents written by travelers about their experiences away from home.
Select Conference Presentations by Shayan S Lallani, PhD
ASFS/AFHVS Annual Conference, University of Alaska Anchorage, 2019
AFHVS/ASFS Annual Conference, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2018
AFHVS/ASFS Annual Conference, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2018
AFHVS/ASFS Annual Conference, Occidental College, Los Angeles, 2017
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PhD Thesis by Shayan S Lallani, PhD
Peer-Reviewed Articles by Shayan S Lallani, PhD
Research Notes by Shayan S Lallani, PhD
Select Conference Presentations by Shayan S Lallani, PhD