Unmoored: Musical Labor and Affective Infrastructure in the Global Cruise Industry

This dissertation is a multi-sited ethnographic analysis of musical performance, work, and feeling in the global cruise ship industry’s live entertainment sector. It foregrounds the political-economic infrastructure through which musical labor on cruise ships comes to be, and the affective power of music toward diverse commercial and political ends in the industry. Critical tourism and leisure research has illuminated issues of social stratification, postcolonial subjectivity, and the uneven development of labor migration in mass-market cruising, while ethnomusicology’s turn toward affective labor and the anthropology of work signals renewed attention to the feelingful praxes of working-class musical entertainers. “Unmoored” refracts these literatures through the lens and language of affect theory, thereby resolving a materialist critique of postwar leisure capitalism from the ensounded vantage point of seafaring musicians and their intermediaries, and a geographical intervention into ethnomusicology via the transnational sites of production that constitute cruising’s political economy of music. It argues that music, labor, and affect are interanimating analytics of what I call the “oceanic postcolonial”: a global system of affective, epistemological, cultural, legal, and financial power that manifests in the felt resonances of western popular music, as packaged for and performed on the high seas. Oceanic postcoloniality organizes the dissertation around five minor-key affective genres, whose corresponding chapters correlate with distinct modes of ethnographic worldmaking. These include seasickness (a critical listening positionality, attuned to neoliberal marketing fantasies of the circum-Caribbean), darkness (a toxic political depression that waylays college-educated, North American showband musicians), underwhelm (a collective ambivalence on the part of cruise audiences), subdivision (a mode of temporal biopolitics harnessed by Filipino nightclub musicians), and languish (a global affect suffusing the industry’s pandemic shutdown). Presenting the dissertation as a “portfolio of feelings,” each chapter-genre writes the oceanic postcolonial at scales of the psychic, social, local, transnational, and global. Together, the case studies articulate a base of knowledge about the global stakes of music in western leisure via a multi-voiced collection of national, ethnic, gendered, and classed perspectives, highlighting the significance of popular music to analyses of globalization, affective labor, and the afterlives of coloniality in contemporary musical livelihood around the world.