Commemorative Surrogation and the American South's Changing Heritage Landscape (original) (raw)
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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.
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.
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.
Still Back of the Big House: Slave Cabins and Slavery in Southern Heritage Tourism
Abstract: A massive tourist infrastructure on southern heritage extends across the US South and a significant component of it focuses on nineteenth-century slavery. Southern heritage tourism reveals irrepressible dimensions of racialization, inextricably mediated by gender and class, and highlights the primary influence of the state. Many tourist sites are housed in former slave plantations and some contain the remains, restorations, reconstructions or replicas of antebellum slave cabins and slave quarters. This article describes and evaluates evidence collected from site observations carried out between 1995 and 2011, on the nature, role and functioning of slave cabins incorporated into these sites. It identifies three strategies for presenting slave cabins as part of heritage tourism—relative incorporation, marginalization and symbolic annihilation—each of which relegates slave cabins to the shadows of the big house. These representations reflect divergent heritage goals and continuing unequal access to resources on the part of different social groups.
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
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.
International Journal of Heritage Studies
This paper argues that an appreciation of the effects of 'southering', or the identity discourse of internal orientalism in the U.S., is key to understanding the historical interpretation provided at plantation museums and the challenges associated with narrative transformation at these heritage sites. An analysis of two plantation museums in Louisiana shows that efforts to transform the whitewashed narratives that fail to account for the psychogeography of southering (as reflected in the 'Southern' deep story) might prove counterproductive. One solution to this problem is the spatial contextualisation of plantation slavery as not only a regional but also a national and global institution-a contextualisation that is both historically accurate and also has the potential to disarm 'Southern' defensiveness through its explicit acknowledgement of the 'guilt' and participation of whites in the system of slavery throughout the U.S. (and even globally). What we ultimately argue for is the need to transcend southering, a binary discourse that creates a moral landscape of uneven racism (racist 'South'/enlightened 'North') while at the same time privileging the agency of whites and occluding African American history and agency.
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.