Destination Dictatorship: The Spectacle of Spain's Tourist Boom and the Reinvention of Difference

by Justin Crumbaugh

Overview

When the right-wing military dictatorship of Francisco Franco decided in 1959 to devalue the Spanish currency and liberalize the economy, the country's already steadily growing tourist industry suddenly ballooned to astounding proportions. Throughout the 1960s, glossy images of high-rise hotels, crowded beaches, and blondes in bikinis flooded public space in Spain as the Franco regime showcased its success. In Destination Dictatorship, Justin Crumbaugh argues that the spectacle of the tourist boom took on a sociopolitical life of its own, allowing the Franco regime to change in radical and profound ways, to symbolize those changes in a self-serving way, and to mobilize new reactionary social logics that might square with the structural and cultural transformations that came with economic liberalization. Crumbaugh's illuminating analysis of the representation of tourism in Spanish commercial cinema, newsreels, political essays, and other cultural products overturns dominant assumptions about both the local impact of tourism development and the Franco regime's final years.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781438426891
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	07/02/2010
Series:	SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	173
Sales rank:	763,467
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Justin Crumbaugh is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Mount Holyoke College.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction

Part 1: Tourism as an Art of Governing

1. Prosperity and Freedom under Franco: The Grand Invention of Tourism

2. On the Public Persona and Political Theory of a Minister of Information and Tourism: Manuel Fraga Iribarne’s “Pedagogy of Leisure” 41

Part 2: Financial, Ideological, and Libidinal Investments

3. The Power of Inauthenticity: The “Spain Is Different”

Tourism Campaign as a Change of Paradigm

4. Blondes in Bikinis and Beachside Don Juans: From the Comedy of Sex Tourism to a State of Perversion

Epilogue: Tourism, Nostalgia, and Historical Memory

Notes
Works Cited
Index