ABSTRACT
The previous chapter examined how mass market cruise lines pursue profits via the production of pleasure at sea and increasingly, on land as well. Their strategies for doing so collectively help constitute cruise tourism’s ‘institutionalized leisure’ context. One important strategy entails transformation of the large/mega cruise ship from a primary mode of transportation to a floating resort with brief port calls. Especially for the more popular itineraries in the Caribbean basin, cruise lines’ production of pleasure in this manner cannot but involve the elision or erasure of some port communities’ complex colonial histories and legacies. Erasure of this kind hardly may be considered a problem if one comes from the perspective that the business of deep ocean pleasure cruising first and foremost is concerned with producing pleasure as opposed to resurrecting pain for profits.
