Sound Touristics

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 3, “Sound Touristics,” draws on the extensive, previously neglected resource of home movies (mostly available online) made about Haiti, which are analyzed here as key pieces of evidence in the early, “golden age” of Caribbean tourism in the 1940s and 1950s. In this period, music became an important part of how Caribbean tourism was marketed, and a means of intra-Caribbean exchange and encounter. The experiences represented in the films are interpreted as what Michael Largey calls “sonic tourism” in the Caribbean, according to which the sounds of the place are as important as the visual experience. The chapter carries out readings that rely less on a binary notion of sound and vision, and move toward the kind of blended, visual-auditory understanding that Glissant gestures toward in Poetic Intention. Can we begin to see through the ears and hear through the eyes?