Destination Dictatorship

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

By Justin Crumbaugh

Subjects: Spanish Studies, Cultural Studies, Film Studies, Political Communication
Series: SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture
Paperback : 9781438426662, 173 pages, July 2010
Hardcover : 9781438426655, 173 pages, October 2009

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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

Examines the relationship of Spain’s 1960s tourist boom to Franco’s right-wing dictatorship.

Description

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.

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