Still Back of the Big House: Slave Cabins and Slavery in Southern Heritage Tourism (original) (raw)
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This paper examines owners of plantation heritage tourism sites as memorial entrepreneurs who control and negotiate the inclusion and specific treatment of the history of African enslavement. Interviews with owners of four South Louisiana plantations are used to document and analyse their complex relationship with the topic of slavery. Interviewed owners reveal varying understandings of tourist demand for the inclusion of slavery on tours and differences in their own personal desire to advertise and fully narrate enslaved heritage. Indeed, owners continue to propagate common myths surrounding the nature of slavery. Conceptualizing owners as memorial entrepreneurs has implications for understanding the interpretation and delivery of heritage tourism not only as a product but also a set of social values about the past.
The big house as home: roots tourism and slavery in the USA
International journal of tourism anthropology, 2018
The dominant discourse preferences the experiences of African Americans who take trips to sites linked to slavery outside of the USA. This paper expands research on roots tourism, by centring the experiences of those who travel to slavery-related sites in the USA. Documenting the case of the Behind the Big House Tour as a response to the Annual Pilgrimage Tour of Historic Homes and Churches in Holly Springs, Mississippi, this study examines evidence for African diasporic roots tourists who acknowledge sites at which their ancestors were enslaved as home sites. Results suggest that this level of acceptance occurs when African Americans come to feel a sense of belonging. The study identifies two general conditions needed to facilitate this process: access to slavery-related sites encouraged by historic site owners or managers and reunion with enslaved ancestors and descendants of those who historically lived and worked at slavery-related sites.
Plantation house museums have come under increased scrutiny for obscuring or excluding altogether histories of enslaved laborers. Plantation sites have by-and-large re-cast the characters of the plantation, transforming spaces of Black labor into spaces of White leisure. However, changing tourist interests/demographics and increased research on representations of slavery have challenged the tradition of Lost Cause ideology as a centerpiece of interpretation at sites of slavery and the effective whitewashing of these formerly majority-Black spaces. Recently there has been a movement to find and implement more-complete interpretations of slavery at historic sites, evidenced by the opening of numerous museums and historic sites that have an interpretive focus on slavery. Tour guides are powerful place-making agents at plantation house museums. The ways tour guides experience place—their physical and emotional labor, development of tours, and engagement with the landscape—contribute to the (re)creation of historical narratives and plantation atmospheres. This dissertation builds on research in cultural geography, critical tourism, and heritage studies that investigate the function and deployment of narrative at plantation house museums and sites of slavery.
Where are the enslaved?: TripAdvisor and the narrative landscapes of southern plantation museums
This study examines two southern Louisiana plantation museums: Laura and Oak Alley, using a framework that stresses the narrative power and politics of these heritage sites. Located a mile from each other along the Mississippi River, they present two similar yet different narratives of the antebellum American South. Laura places more emphasis on the enslaved who inhabited the plantation than does Oak Alley, whose narrative centers upon the opulence of the plantation home – that is, ‘the big house'. This study explores what visitors take away from their plantation tours. Specifically, it examines their thoughts about how the enslaved are represented at these two museums. The study's data come from visitors’ comments posted on the travel website TripAdvisor. The object of the study is to gain a greater understanding of what visitors learn about the history of the enslaved on these tours and how they participate, along with site managers, in the narrative construction of the plantation and negotiating the divide between tourism as amusement and tourism as memorial.
The embodied absence of the past: Slavery heritage and the transformative memory work of tourism
This tour was truly amazing. I was born and raised in the Netherlands and attended Dutch schools. I visit Amsterdam often, I had no idea that the city had so many hidden historical secrets. This part of the Dutch history was not given when I was in school. [(TripAdvisor Review comment on the Black Heritage Amsterdam Tours, June 2014)] Slavery heritage tourism narratives can be transformative at both individual and societal level by activating plural public memories. Yet, since Bruner's (1996) work on slavery heritage tourism, the lack of consistent engagement with key concepts such as collective memory has meant a failure to illuminate the cultural and political work of tourism in societal debates. Empirically, research on slavery heritage tourism has accounted for themes such as visitor typologies, motivations and experiences, and the marketing and management of such sites in
Memory, Slavery, and Plantation Museums: The River Road Project
Heritage tourism plays an increasingly important yet controversial role in interpreting the emotionally and politically charged memories and legacies of African enslavement. Antebellum plantation museums in the southeastern USA remain relatively underanalyzed by researchers, despite their tradition of ignoring and minimizing the contributions and struggles of the slave community. Yet, this neglect is being challenged somewhat by a growing number of plantations and counter-narrative sites that incorporate slavery into docent-led tours, promotional materials, exhibits, and preserved structures. Responding to a need for scholarship that can ferret out the nuances, complexities, and conflicts of producing and consuming heritage at these tourist sites, this special issue presents the results of a study of four plantations (Laura, Oak Alley, Houmas House, San Francisco) along Louisiana's River Road. The issue's editors and contributing authors address a central question: what factors, social actors, and interactions (social and spatial in nature) shape, facilitate, or even constrain the remembering of slavery at southern plantation museums, including those sites making seemingly significant progress in recovering the enslaved? River Road is a microcosm of the larger politics of reshaping southern and American heritage tourism and demonstrates the value of industry-engaged, multi-method examinations of different plantation landscapes within the same region.
On the Political Utterances of Plantation Tourists: Vocalizing the Memory of Slavery on River Road
Within the study of southern plantation house museums, the cultural power that tourists exercise in interpreting, reacting to, and even shaping historical narratives has received limited attention. The purpose of this paper is to advance our understanding of the agency of visitors at plantation museums, paying particular attention to their verbal expressions as they respond to the depiction of slavery on guided tours. Spoken words, questions, and conversations of plantation tourists are not unproblematic transmissions of information but represent "political utterances" that play a crucial role in the constitution and mediation of the process of remembering (or forgetting) the enslaved. We consider the importance of tourist voice and outline two analytical settings for studying the political utterances of plantation visitorsthe vocalizing of interpretative communities in post-tour or exit interviews and docent reaction to on-tour comments and questions posed by visitors. Drawing evidence from interviews with visitors and docents at four tourist plantation along the River Road District, we demonstrate the diversity and impact of the political utterances of tourists, and how these vocalizations of memory can possibly lead to greater changes in the way in which slavery is dealt with and remembered at southern plantation museums.
Tourism landscapes are constructed and marketed in selective ways that reaffirm long-standing patterns of social power and inequality and thus influence whose histories and identities are remembered and forgotten. The purpose of this article is to conduct an analysis of plantation tourism marketing in North Carolina, measuring the degree to which the history of slavery and the enslaved are (in)visible within online promotional texts. Previous research has found that the slave experience is frequently ignored in promoting the Southern plantation, although the analysis of North Carolina has been limited in the past and no studies to date have examined the promotional images found on plantation websites. An analysis of 20 websites for historic plantations in North Carolina does not reveal a universal exclusion of the enslaved but it certainly shows an uneven treatment both in terms of the absolute number of textual references to slavery and the frequency of these references relative to other themes used in marketing the plantation landscape. Among those plantation websites that show a sensitivity to slave history, two discourses are employed that still run the risk of misrepresenting the enslaved even as they devote needed attention to this marginalized population. They are the discourse of the individual (a)typical slave, and the discourse of the good master/faithful slave. We conclude by highlighting two representational strategies used by some plantation websites that could serve as exemplars for other destinations inside the state and beyond. These strategies include documenting the different identities and histories of many slaves rather just a few, and discussing the hardships and resistance that often characterized the slave experience.