"God Willing, I Will Do Something Else": Affective Intensities in Cruise Ship Tourism Encounters in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic

Based on 7 months of fieldwork conducted in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic, this dissertation explores the affective intensities that emerge from an ever-changing, unstable tourism imaginary of a paradisiacal Puerto Plata, a frame into which Carnival Cruises sails. Located in the Bay of Maimn, just west of Puerto Plata, Amber Cove is the first cruise ship venture in the area since the last cruise ship sailed away in the 1980s, a venture meant to reinvent and reinvigorate the tourism industry in the province. Touted as an "incredible project" by tourism officials, this research traces the tensions, the frustrations, the disappointments and the hopes that overspill from the tourism encounters that unfold in this new project that promised so many things. Drawing on Gordon's (1997) notion of haunting, this research contributes a unique perspective to important work in tourism studies already examining the historical and contemporary socioeconomic and political consequences of the tourism industry. It is a way to explore the particularities of individual experience without disconnecting them from the political economy (ibid., xvii), throwing into stark relief the structures of power that reach across time and space to make themselves known, felt and sensed in the present. By informing this project using theoretical work on affect, I consider the things that "don't add up" (Stewart 2008, 72), the things that provoke and compel, the "something more" (Stewart 1996, 5-6) that efforts to codify would "[strip] of the dense and deeply mortal flesh of life" (Pandian and McLean 2017, 4). In so doing, this dissertation addresses two questions: 1) How does the cruise ship tourism industry shape tourist-local interactions and the expectations, desires, confusions and disappointments on which these relationships are fashioned? 2) How do locals frame, understand and experience these new kinds of encounters given the shift from enclave resort tourism to cruise ship tourism? By exploring how the cruise ship tourism industry animates and enlivens the tourism frame in Puerto Plata, my research contributes to our understanding of what tourism encounters in a cruise ship tourism context can look and feel like, moving beyond a representational or "critical" theory approach to the industry (Stewart 2008).