Many journals on hospitality, leisure, and tourism management have drawn attention to touristic experience and local histories of encounter. Far fewer have addressed the political economy of commercial hospitality through music and sound. This paper focuses on what informs the tourists’ experience, specifically the music and sound policies dictated by hotel managers, and the labor musicians perform under different regimes of value. These regimes are informed as much by economic and political forces at a macro level, as by the management and musicians’ distinct personal style and understandings of hospitality. Through the lens of labor, the moral force of long-held traditions and their economic implications for gender politics are revealed. It is in these conjunctions that this study locates the shaping of experience as affecting and affective dimensions of the political economy of tourism. 

Jocelyne Guilbault is an ethnomusicologist and popular music studies scholar who has been teaching at UC Berkeley since 1999. Stressing a multidisciplinary approach, her research and teaching engages critical theoretical and methodological issues in ethnomusicology and popular music studies. She locates these issues in the scholarly intersections of music, anthropology, cultural studies, and history.

New articles on music and militarization and on theorizing work ethics will appear in 2017 in an edited volume on Caribbean military encounters, and in Popular Music. Her current book project is titled The Political Economy of Music and Sound: Case Studies from the Caribbean Tourism Industry, co-edited with Timothy Rommen. She is the author of Zouk: World Music in the West Indies (1993), Governing Sound: the Cultural Politics of Trinidad’s Carnival Musics (2007), and co-author of Roy Cape: A Life on the Calypso and Soca Bandstand (2014).

Made possible by support from the
William E. Valente Endowment in Music.