Reworking Blackness: Elite Fragmentation and Cultural Contestation in Jamaican Tourism Advertising, 1970–1990

• In Event: Bureaucratic Politics and the Organizational State

Abstract

How do states represent Blackness in tourist advertising, and what explains transformations over time? This chapter examines how representations of Blackness in Jamaican tourism advertising were constructed and reconfigured between 1970 and 1990. Prior to the 1970s, tourism promotion emphasized “respectable” Blackness rooted in rural imagery, service labor, and Brown middle-class respectability, while marginalizing urban Black cultural forms. Beginning in the 1970s, state agencies and private actors increasingly incorporated previously excluded cultural forms, like reggae, into national branding strategies.

Drawing on my dissertation’s interactive model of racialized narratives, I conceptualize representational change as the outcome of shifting alliances among bureaucrats, capitalists, and intellectuals, as well as challenges from counterhegemonic actors. Building on state-centered, neo-Marxist, and neo-Gramscian theories, I argue that narrative durability and flexibility depend on elite alignment and cultural contestation. Declining elite alignment combined with strong cultural contestation creates openings for more transformative representational shifts.Using historical and archival methods, I analyze government records, tourism advertisements, institutional reports, and newspaper coverage from major Jamaican and U.S. outlets.

The analysis shows that from the 1950s through the 1960s, a cohesive alliance of White hoteliers and Brown elites promoted narrow representations aligned with their economic interests. However, during the 1970s, alliances between Rastafarian groups, intellectuals, and labor organizations strengthened counterhegemonic narratives, while political and bureaucratic changes weakened elite coordination. These dynamics facilitated the selective incorporation of reggae into tourism promotion during the late 1970s and 1980s. I argue that this shift reflected declining elite cohesion and growing cultural legitimacy of marginalized actors rather than simple market adaptation. However, radical cultural forms were partially sanitized for global consumption. The findings demonstrate how racialized national images are produced through shifting configurations of political, economic, and cultural power.

Author

• Johanna Hernandez Perez, University of California-Los Angeles