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Anita Gonzalez, "Shipping Out: Race, Performance, and Labor at Sea" (U Michigan Press, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Anita Gonzalez about her book titled Shipping Race, Performance and Labor at Sea, published by the University of Michigan Press in 2025. Now, this book is really cool because it takes us through a whole bunch of different layers, I suppose, to understand cruises. Cruises now, cruises, historically, cruises officially in the performance level and kind of below the deck of what's happening maybe in places that we wouldn't otherwise pay attention to, and weaving all of these different times and places together to help us make sense of some interesting and pretty big important concepts like performance, like race, like labor. So clearly we have a lot to discuss. Anita, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [02:02]
C
Thank you. Thank you so much, Miranda. It's really a pleasure to be here.
- [02:07]
B
Well, I'm very pleased to have you, too. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
- [02:15]
C
Yes, my name is Dr. Anita Gonzalez and I'm a professor of Performing arts and Black Studies at Georgetown University. And I decided to write this book for several reasons. For many years, I have taught about the African Grove Theater, which. Which is an African American Theater. Company from 1821 that occurred in New York City. And after years of teaching it, I asked myself, well, these were African Americans who were performing Shakespeare in a helm theater in New York City during the time of slavery and during a time when blacks were perceived as being ignorant and servile. And so I wondered where they came from. Why were they doing Shakespeare in New York in 1821? And it turned out that they were all stewards on the packet ships that traveled between New York and Liverpool during the first part of the 19th century. And so that encouraged me to start to look into what a packet ship was and why these people were sailing the seas during this time period. And it led me to the Maritime Institute at Mystic Seaport, where I was able to work with other people who were scholars of maritime studies and be able to put these workers in context. And then later, because I'd been cruising on cruise ships as a destination lecturer, I tried to bring those two worlds together in this book.
- [03:41]
B
I always love hearing the origin stories of a project. Thank you for that introduction. But I think the thread I most want to pick up on is the destination lecturer. That's not necessarily something everyone will be familiar with. So can you tell us more of what that role is?
- [03:56]
C
Certainly. Destination lecturers are people that come onto cruise ships in order to explain the destinations to the passengers. As you may know, many people cruise and they only are in each port for one day. So they're traveling from place to place, maybe getting off the ship, but they are not at all aware of what's going on on the land. So they have destination lectures to kind of prep the passengers about the destination that they will be going to. Within this world of destination lecturers, there are people who are special interest lecturers who talk about topics that are not related to the ports, and then they're destination lecturers. So in general, I am a destination lecturer for Caribbean cruise ships where I talk about the places that people will be going to.
- [04:40]
B
Okay, that's very helpful to understand as well. Now, obviously, in what you've already described to us and those of us who teach, kind of know that this is embedded in any sort of teaching. There's a performance aspect to.
- [04:51]
C
Right.
- [04:51]
B
You're trying to engage people. And especially in that context of cruises where people have kind of limited time to engage with the ports, that kind of obviously puts some constraints on how you're conveying this information. But you talk about in the book that it's kind of more than just sort of as if it was a university lecture. There's kind of some other aspects or layers of performance that are embedded in this too. Can you tell us a bit more about that piece of it?
- [05:15]
C
Yes, absolutely. So, yes, there's the performance part of it, where you are in front of other people and presenting. And the cruise ships deliberately want people who are entertaining presenters, people who are doing more than just delivering content. But at the same time, as a person of African American descent and also just as a regular classroom teacher, I'm now performing something different because I'm a part of the entertainment staff. So I'm performing a kind of expertise that's deeply embedded in who I am as a person as I enter the ship. And then what's fascinating about the cruise ship environment is that throughout the journey there are people doing performances on a variety of different levels. The people who are serving people, the people who are the workers on the ship are performing this attitude of servitude which is one of the core concepts of the book, this idea that I'm here to serve you. And I write in the book that whereas this idea of serving happens of course in restaurants and hotels and many of the land based places on the cruise ship, they are permanently in that role. They don't get off the ship for six months or nine months or sometimes years. And all throughout that time they are performing servitude. And at the same time, the passengers, many of whom are working class or retired on most of the cruises that I go on, they are performing this kind of. I am the elite and I believe I deserve to be taken care of throughout my journey. So there's levels of performance that are intersecting within this kind of encapsulated space for the duration of the cruise. And then everybody plays out their role.
- [06:56]
B
Okay. So these ideas of roles and the labor needed to kind of enact these conceptualizations is coming through very clearly in that description. And interestingly, not a lot of what you've told us about is kind of specific to the 21st century.
- [07:11]
C
Right?
- [07:11]
B
Kind of. Quite easily. We could imagine those same sorts of dynamics playing out in the 1980s, in the 1930s, maybe even further back than that. And in fact, this is something you discuss in the book, that there are consistent threads of labour practices that we can see even comparing, for instance, the 19th century with what we're seeing now. Can you tell us about what some of those might be?
- [07:33]
C
Absolutely. The book takes you back to the 19th century because that was when they started to have these packet ships. So people were thinking about packet ships. Packet ships are ships that move goods from place to place, and also mail services from place to place during the 19th century. And on those ships, that's when people started to kind of go along with the packages. So it was more than about the destinations. It was about people serving. So I go back to the 19th century and looking at how laborers have enabled people to work on passenger ships that are just. Because that's the time where we think of the sailing ships. During the 19th century, people moved from sailing ships to steamers. And it was during that time where we began to see seamen and laborers who were trying to communicate with one another across their journeys to learn more about the places and destinations that they're going to. And I find parallels to that in the contemporary cruise ship industry, as laborers who come from multiple nations, come together in order to work, but also to learn more about one another. I think a core concept that comes to me from the 19th century is that we often talk about people learning about other cultures when they land in ports or when they form cities in other countries. But I am proposing that people learn about one another on the ship itself. And that process started in the 19th century because the world was expanding at that moment in time.
- [09:06]
B
Okay, that's definitely a clear reason to look back at that point. But thinking about more on this, learning about each other, as you said, it's not just in the port, it's on the ship, but it also is in multiple places on the ship. Obviously, it's happening in kind of formal lectures like the one you give, which, you know, from the pictures included in the book, are often in, as one would expect, sort of big event spaces in theaters, that kind of thing. But of course, that's not the only place where one might interact with someone who's coming from a different place. And you therefore focus in the book on spaces that we may not look at for these interactions, like corridors or staircases, that might seem really mundane. How might these also be places of encounter, of learning, of performance?
- [09:49]
C
These are micro spaces. You speak about that so well, Miranda. Thank you. In these micro spaces, such as the cafeteria or the place where people are eating together, One of the things that cruise ships talk a lot about is their international crew. So passengers, I see these conversations all the time where they're asking about where are you from and what is your family like, and what is it like when you live there, and how do you work on the ship and away from the ship? The micro performance spaces are often in dining spaces because they're predominant in most cruise ships, but also the libraries and the Libraries, people are kind of stimulated to think about how they are relating to the rest of the world. One of the most interesting things is that on ships there have always been libraries. Like from the first times of the ages of exploration. People would create these big cartons where they would put books so people could think about learning. I think another thing about the learning that happens on the cruise ship is that the entire cruise is a reflective space because there's nothing to see but the water. And then you start to wonder, well, who am I in relationship to this natural environment and who is in this space with me? So those are some of the spaces. The crew also has their own spaces where they interact with one another in a different way. But I find it most interesting to watch the crew and passenger relationships, partly because you're kind of talking across class lines in ways that may not happen in spaces that you're not spending as much time with one another.
- [11:19]
B
Yeah, definitely. There's nowhere else to go aspect of it, I think plays into it too. But I wonder if we can talk maybe about one particular sort of type of interaction you discuss in the book. Obviously you have many examples, but I'd love to pick out the sea shanty as being one of them because these are, of course, have had, I think, some viral moments on social media in the last few years and have been around in ships of all kinds for really quite a long time. But I think often, especially with the more recent revivals, there might be a sort of oversimplification of where these come from and what they are. And in the book, you do a much more interesting and nuanced tracing of the different places and the different traditions that kind of have been intertwined in these types of songs. So can you maybe give us a sense of where these songs have come from?
- [12:11]
C
So sea shanties are basically work songs. People describe sea shanties as a mixture of, let's say, Irish ballads or storytelling songs with work songs. And the work songs originated on the coast of Africa. People talk about them having come from the crew. The word KRU K R U is the name of the tribe and people. Some people attribute the name of the word crew to the kru, people who work in unison along the waterways moving canoes. So in the first, they're work songs. Sea shanties are connected to particular types of work. There's the hand over hand songs, there's the songs that are for pushing the capstan. And each of them have different kind of rhythms and cadences underneath them. But also the cities are ways of communicating I do a lot of work in all of my projects about the working class and how they communicate. And it's not through written languages. It's through songs and gestures and oral histories and storytellings. So in the sea shanties, what I found interesting about them is that if you look at the ones from the late 1800s, they're racially very specific. So they talk about Irish people at sea, they talk about Mexican people at sea, they talk about African people at sea. They communicate what's going on in the various ports. And that's what I find fascinating about the sea shanty, as well as some of them are couched in the jargon of the ship itself. And then some of them you can't take at face value because these are men, primarily men, who are longing for women. So a lot of them are about this kind of longing for women. But they're also communicating journeys that have happened. There's one about an Irishman who goes from England and then he comes to work. And the more he works in the United States, the more he loses, instead of gains, in terms of work, what he's been hoping to find in the New Americas. So I find that the storytelling aspect of sea shanties, coupled with the work aspect of sea shanties, to be something that is very important to their core iteration.
- [14:14]
B
And how do you translate that to audiences on cruise ships today? Obviously, they're not pulling ropes, so how do you bring them to life in today's cruise environment?
- [14:25]
C
Well, first of all, the cruise ships, that's not one of their favorite topics because it points to labor. But honest, I use them on the cruise ship as a way of getting the audience involved in call and response, and for them to understand more about the history of shipping and seamanship on the ship. I don't think they run around the ship singing sea shanties, but I do try to get them to sing along with me every once in a while.
- [14:50]
B
And what do you sort of find then in doing that? Like, how is it. Does it change the meaning of the song to have it performed in such a different context? Or are there similarities still between kind of what's happening in the 21st century versus what you found in the historical record?
- [15:08]
C
I think it changes it completely. I don't think that the people who are on the contemporary cruise ships are connected to either labor or the history of that work. Now, I think another thing that you may be referring to is there is a movement of people who are singing contemporary sea shanties, and in that case, they serve the purpose of community. Building it's like getting people to celebrate heritage and community when they are sung mostly on shore, not on ships, but remembering the days or honoring those people who are still working the sea. So then it's a community gathering space more than a workload. Remember that the sea shanties originated primarily on the sailing ships, and so the steamers didn't require that kind of labor. But when I think about the circulation of song across cultures and communities, in places where people still work together, they still sing together to make that work easier.
- [16:01]
B
Well, thinking then, about how these sorts of ideas play out on shore, we have obviously been focusing mainly on the ship. But of course, the cruise ships stop in places, Right. That's the whole going back to what is the purpose of a destination lecture in the first place, Right. To tell people about where they're going to be stopping in its most sort of immediate sense. Sense. What then about the places where they're stopping are kind of part of this conversation as much as the ship is sort of a closed environment, as you've described. Do some of these aspects of sites of performance around ideas of race and internationalism also spill over onto the ports themselves?
- [16:39]
C
Absolutely. You know, the ports in a cruise ship are orchestrated, so cruise ships because of the passengers that they're carrying. I think there's a real irony here. Passengers take cruises to go to other places to experience new cultures, but when they get off of the cruise ship, the cruise ship is concerned about liability and protection, and working with verified and certified vendors will be able to deliver to the passengers a safe experience. So what they do is that there are many ports, especially in the Caribbean, that are sealed off from the rest of the countries themselves. And that's why the destination lecture becomes very important and at the same time, within the ports because they want to have a sense of authenticity. Local performers who may be cab drivers or school teachers or lawyers or doctors, are hired to perform their culture, like on the decks at the very port stations, in order for the passengers to feel as if they've experienced something that is authentic in the country. Now, what's really interesting about some of the countries in the Caribbean, like the Dominican Republic, is because cruise travel is one of the primary income providers for people on the island, Is it trying to have cruise passengers participate in experiences that are more local and more connected to people who actually live on the islands? So, for example, I did a recent cruise where one of the cruises was to go to somebody's house, and that way the cruise passengers in a small bus are taken to the house to experience the port in a different way. But what I write about in the book is how the ports, no matter what century you're in, is a place of exchange. It's a place where people get off the ship and money starts to pass forth, back and forth, forth, along with information about where people have been and where they're going and what's going on in that particular land. So I think that Both in the 19th century and also continuing into the 21st century, the ports are places where people encounter one another. I do want to say one more caveat around that, which is that in the 19th century all ports were people ports, like there were people there. But nowadays there are these large industrial ports, ports that are cargo ports. And generally the cruise ship is docking in a cargo port which may or may not be close to the center of the town. One of the things I really enjoy about the Caribbean cruises is that often the ports are near the center of town. So you do get this kind of back and forth interaction that's happening between the people who are locals and the people who are bringing money and the people who constructed these environments for the passengers to experience a safe space of encounter across racial and cultural identities.
- [19:26]
B
Yeah, that's definitely interesting to think about. And I can absolutely see from your perspective, especially kind of why you'd be more interested in those ports than one sort of in big industrial areas with not a lot of interesting interactions. So definitely worth the caveat there. Is there anything else you really hope readers take from this book? Whether or not they've been on a cruise in the Caribbean or anywhere else?
- [19:49]
C
I think, I hope they'll think about the working class and about how the working class is not like a class, it's a performance of class. Right. People have lives and stuff on their own and in the cruise ship, I think that it's kind of amplified how they're performing servitude. So I want people to think about both how shipping has not shifted in terms of social interactions in some ways across space, time and place, and also about how people are performing both identity and culture all of the time, and that it's a performative, crafted environment. I mean, I do want to say, like on behalf of the cruise industry, I think it's an amazingly orchestrated world. I think I'm fascinated by how much coordination happens amongst the crew, amongst the passengers, in order to create this immersive entertainment space for a limited time period. And that, I think is why the cruise industry is so popular now. Because now, of course, there's like Themed cruises around different kinds of content. But across all of the cruises, there is this unique and unusual sustained interaction between workers and passengers that allows for new kinds of reflective ideas and events to happen.
- [21:06]
B
Yeah, it is very much a whole world and clearly one that you're fascinated by. So although this book is obviously out in the world and off your desk, is this the sort of thing you're continuing to engage with? Do you have a current or next project you want to tell us about?
- [21:20]
C
I do. I have a current project about coastal shipping is what I'll call it, but it's really about rural communities who are along coastal waterways. And I'm looking at the connection between coastal waterways in the Bahamas and coastal waterways in the Chesapeake Bay specifically. It's like micro histories of the Eastern Shore of Maryland and also of Cat island in the Bahamas. And in both of those communities, people feel a strong connection to the waterways, but they've created cultures, black cultures, in which people are able to survive and sustain themselves through the waterways, but also through a sense of fugitivity, like they're able to escape and go other places because they are near waterways. And it is also connected with these stories of American Revolution and the stories of the British Loyalists and how African Americans collaborated with the British Loyalists in order to find their freedom along the waterways. So it's an extension, but very different. It is using multimodal methodologies. So we have oral histories, geo mapping, counter mapping and ethnography, and of course historical archival research all mixed together. So it's similar to this book in that it's based upon this kind of mixed methodology, but it's talking about the land based rural African American, African and black British communities along coastal waterways.
- [22:47]
B
Okay, well, that sounds very cool. So hopefully that will become a book and you can come back and tell us all about it, but love that. No, assume you've got at least one reader over here wanting to know more. But of course, in the meantime, listeners can read the book you've already finished that is, as I said, out in the world, titled Shipping Out Race, Performance and Labour at Sea, published by the University of Michigan Press in 2025. Asking and answering all sorts of questions around those key words of race, performance and labour, and of course, their interactions. Anita, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [23:23]
C
Thank you very much, Miranda. This was lovely being here.