Sun, Sea, and Sound: Music and Tourism in the Circum-Caribbean by Timothy Rommen and Daniel T. Neely (review)

Music and tourism in the Caribbean are often linked in the popular imagination but have rarely been studied together, at least in the field of ethnomusicology. As Timothy Rommen points out in the introduction to Sun, Sea, and Sound, much scholarly work has been done on visual aspects of tourism, leaving sound a largely unacknowledged, untapped subject of research. With this in mind, the book addresses various issues relating to music and tourism throughout the circum-Caribbean, which extends, in this case, at least as far as northeastern Brazil and the southern United States.

Divided into themed sections on the mass tourism market, patterns of musical (and human) circulation, insider and outsider tourism, music festivals, and sexual and spiritual music touristics, the individual chapters address not only the more familiar topics of representation and exploitation but also those of patriotism, migration, belonging, and personal fulfillment. Each chapter deals with the specifics of a particular location and/or community, bringing the general themes to life on a human scale through various methods, including historical and archival research as well as fieldwork. The book demonstrates that far from being a frivolous aspect of unidirectional travel and consumption, music in the context of tourism represents complex desires and efforts on the part of many actors, be they governments, musicians, or “tourists” (which, it becomes clear, is one label attached to diverse types of travelers).

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. Extending the geographic range beyond the cartographic Caribbean allows for consideration of particular locales and issues that are productive not only in their own right but also in the ways they inform each other. Regional and theoretical themes reappear throughout the volume in ways that create a sense of unity without reducing the region to a single, monolithic entity. In addition to the explicit themes by which the book is organized, other, implicit connections present opportunities for further inquiry.

In addition to exposure of the previously understudied topic of music and tourism, one of the contributions of the book is that it moves beyond the more trodden conceptions of tourism as imperialist exploitation and delves into the lives and experiences of participants. While unequal power dynamics are acknowledged, authors examine the choices of musicians and local communities in how they represent themselves—both to themselves and to outsiders (e.g., Oliver N. Green Jr.’s chapter on the Garifuna celebration of Settlement Day). In addition, the very definition of tourist is also brought into question: a tourist can be not only a US American or European who visits for relatively short periods of time seeking sun, sea, and sand, as the phrase goes, but also a domestic or expatriate visitor looking for different kinds of connections to the cultural heritage of a given place, as demonstrated in Michael Largey’s chapter on the circulation of Haitian Rara and Jerome Camal’s chapter on the Festival Gwoka in Guadeloupe. As an additional comment on the diversity in the category of “tourist,” Katherine Hagedorn’s chapter ends the book with a refreshing and forward-looking account of how tourism works in ways that are often unacknowledged: admitting her own role as a tourist, she considers the motives of others like her, demonstrating that they are not limited to simple escapism but can include a sincere desire to experience something not accessible to the tourist while at home. This, as well as other perspectives in this volume, should be helpful in destigmatizing tourism as a topic of ethnomusicological study, both in the circum-Caribbean and beyond.