Chapter two is done! Sort of…
I finished a chapter of my thesis. Finally. I realized last week that what I thought of as one chapter was really two. So I split it in half. The good news is of course that I ended up with a completed chapter, completed by my self-imposed deadline. The better news is that this means that I’m also more than half-way towards finishing the next chapter.
I’m thinking of posting the text on the site to get feedback from who ever will read it. We’ll see. The chapter is entitled “A Brief Social History of Tourism in the Bahamas 1740 – 1967″ I’m trying to give background information for the Fergusons of Farm Road. It’s impossible to understand what is going on in the scripts without first understanding their context. Chapter three is tentatively title “A Brief History of the Bahamian Courtesy Campaign 1955 – 1970.” To the best of my knowledge no one has written about this before. I’m pretty sure there is no Bahamian literature on it. The most I see is a sentence that describes “a friendliness campaign” that happened in 1970, this thing goes quite a bit deeper than that. (Well at least I think so anyway 
)
Good news to report to on what will happen with all of this when I graduate. I got a grant from the Cable Bahamas Cares foundation to get the scripts published. I hope to do a great deal more than just publish them too. Big plans. We’ll see if they become reality soon enough. First the thesis!
I’ve also fixed up the website a bit, as regular visitors will know. (Who, pray tell, are these regular visitors?) It now looks good enough and works well enough that I can post-pone the major surgery that I had intended for it. The essays are gone from the page list and they live in their own little parallel universe away from the blog posts. The home page has gotten a nice little picture. (With unintentional symbolism no less, thorny problems, and a thorny fence!)
I still need to fix up the blog page and get some air on the page, and I think something is wrong with the sidebar in archives view… I guess the main thing I want to do is to get a projects page going, one that outlines my evolving Fergusons work and let’s you know what’s going on. I guess this blog will still serve that purpose.
When I started this dot info site, I didn’t realize how much content I had to put up here. And it looks like much more to come…
June 19th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
If I may? What are the implications of these brief social histories?
June 21st, 2009 at 12:51 pm
@Serene
Implications as in ‘what is the point?’ Very good question and of course you may. I am researching a radio show that was designed to make Bahamians nice to tourists. The radio show was a part of a larger courtesy campaign. That campaign came out of a tradition of other such campaigns that had been going on for over 20 years. The campaigns themselves come out of the Bahamas dependence on Tourism, that itself has its own peculiar history stretching over 100 years…
So to talk about the show I first need to get the reader to the front door. Think of it as a three chapter foyer.
The point of the whole thing is to investigate ways that the state manipulates its citizens to get what it wants. And how the state convinces those citizens that they want what the state wants. Classic social control / hegemony…
This particular manifestation (the radio show) was much more creative than other methods and interestingly became a cultural phenomenon. Today, no one remembers that the show had anything to do with tourism. In other words, it became something else.
So this whole thing is (I believe) an compelling tale of the government of a microstate, a colonizing metropole, and the people, taking what they were given and transforming it into an expression of themselves…
You know, conquering human spirit and all that.
Does that answer anything?