Where are the enslaved?: TripAdvisor and the narrative landscapes of southern plantation museums

ABSTRACT

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

ABSTRACT

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

ABSTRACT

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 visitors – the 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.     

Counter-narratives of slavery in the Deep South: the politics of empathy along and beyond River Road

ABSTRACT

The historical institution of slavery is unevenly memorialized across the US's cultural landscape. This unevenness is particularly noticeable in ‘Deep South’ states such as Mississippi and Louisiana, where cotton and sugar cane plantations once required vast numbers of slaves to economically succeed. While many antebellum plantation sites now function as tourist attractions complete with ‘Big House’ tours, they often ignore or annihilate the memory of slavery from plantation history. However, not all plantations and museums disregard slavery, and the owners and workers at these sites intentionally employ slavery counter-narratives to evoke empathy in visitors and create a more socially just cultural landscape. This paper examines three sites along and beyond River Road that employ counter-narrative techniques: the Natchez Museum of African-American History and Culture, Frogmore Cotton Plantation, and Whitney Plantation. The paper includes a discussion of each site's narrative tactics and how they stand out from other plantation sites in their representation of slavery. Engaging in growing conversations on the possibilities of empathetic responses to counter-narrative spaces, this paper argues that empathy – while important and possible for many visitors and consumers at these sites of memory – may preclude important political activism and greater solidarity between racial groups.     

Object narratives and the enslaved at Sam Houston memorial museum

Objects offer an opportunity to narrate the past. Tourism scholarship has found that plantation museums in the American South give considerable attention to objects associated with the planter class to engage visitors with stories about them and their lifestyle. At the same time, museum stakeholders have cited a lack of objects associated with the enslaved as a barrier to greater representations of slavery. However, the concept of an interface object indicates objects can be used to make connections between things that are not intrinsic and to insert issues into stories that are told. These objects can even become charged with such issues. Using the case study of the Sam Houston Memorial Museum in Huntsville, Texas (USA), this paper considers the use of objects in narrating the past, particularly as it relates to slavery. It draws upon participant observation of guided tours and narrative analysis of the stories told about the enslaved on the Houston farm to consider how ordinary objects are used to incorporate slavery into the overarching museum narrative. Finally, the paper concludes that such objects are effective in initiating the conversation about slavery but are not sufficiently charged to facilitate a more meaningful engagement with the issue.     

Whitewashing Plantations

Summary

This article begins with a brief explanation of personal experiences on plantation tours. It follows with an empirical examination of tourist brochures from over 100 plantations and a textual analysis of their data. A frequency count of keywords is created, serving to highlight that “slavery,” “slaves” and “slave cabins” occur less often than such expressions as “owners,” “landscapes” and “furnishings.” Reasons for this imbalance are sought. More specifically, the investigation asks why plantation owners and their operations under-emphasize slavery and what this situation means for the contemporary tourist. In so doing, the inquiry attempts to answer the question as to whether or not such mar-ginalization of slavery is a legitimate concern now and in the future.     

Charleston,South Carolina Tourism and the Presentation of Urban Slavery in an Historic Southern City

ABSTRACT

Heritage tourism's depiction of slavery makes for an interesting study. Several years ago, David Butler published an article in this journal that was highly critical of the depiction of slavery by Southern US plantations during tours offered to visitors, indicating that these attractions “whitewashed” this aspect of their history. The current study, intended as an extension of Butler's work, focused upon urban slavery versus plantation slavery and the handling of the issue by historic antebellum houses now opened as heritage tourist attractions in Charleston, SC. Encouragingly, it was learned that these historic homes are doing a much fairer job of exposing their guests to the issue than had been noted by Butler's plantation tours.     

Following the story: narrative mapping as a mobile method for tracking and interrogating spatial narratives

Museums and heritage tourism sites are highly curated places of memory work whose function is the assembling and ordering of space and narrative to contour visitors’ experiences of the past. Variations in such experiences within and between sites, however, necessitates a method that: (1) captures how guides, visitors, and exhibits interact within spaces when representing and performing history and (2) allows researchers to document those variations. We developed narrative mapping, a mobile and geographically sensitive form of participant observation, to enable museum scholars and professionals to systematically capture, visualize, and interpret tendencies and variations in the content, affective qualities, and spatial arrangements of museum narratives over multiple sites and across multiple tours at the same site. Two antebellum plantation museum case studies, Laura Plantation in Louisiana and Virginia’s Berkeley Plantation, demonstrate the method’s utility in documenting how stories are spatially configured and materially enlivened in order to analyze the ways enslaved persons are placed within these narratives.     

Representations of slavery

Adopting collective memory as the conceptual framework, this study sought to explore dominant narratives of a publicly owned former slave plantation opened to tourists. Textual analysis of promotional material revealed prominent frames through which tourists are invited to perceive the contemporary rearticulation of the plantation. The findings revealed a process of textual semantic prosody wherein the dominant narratives enacted a rhetoric of distance from the institution of slavery and achieved a discourse of proximity to a progressive account. The plantation is viewed as a mnemonic device endowed with political dimensions that reinforce hegemonic ideologies and engender remembering while concurrently inducing forgetting.     

Occupying whateverland: Journeys to museums in the Baltic

Recent history of Central and Eastern Europe charts multiple occupations, liberations and re-occupations by a variety of states and regimes. Museums of recent history, located across the region, strive to both constitute a memorial shaping narratives of national identity, and to represent the past in a way both recognizable and persuasive for their predominantly international tourist visitors. These visitors come with their own preconceptions and aims towards building both a historical narrative of the past and a personal identity narrative of a cultured, engaged tourist. In this paper, we chart how the historical past is used in contemporary sensemaking processes in the museums, and how tourist interpretations cross organizational and national barriers that the museum-curated historical narratives attempt to create.     

Rethinking slavery heritage tourism

This paper argues that the investigation of slavery heritage within a ‘thana’- or ‘dark’ tourism framework invariably fails to appreciate the subtleties, power relationships and various contestations that are at play in both the presentation and consumption of former Transatlantic Slave Trade (TAST) sites. Instead, the authors argue that a combination of Halbwachs’ collective memory theory and Tunbridge and Ashworth's concept of dissonant heritage can provide a deeper understanding of tourism linked to such sites. A study of TAST sites in Ghana identified six key groups of stakeholders involved in the interpretation of slavery heritage, each with its own agenda, desire to remember or forget slave memories and desire to compose different narratives. By analysing collective slave memories, the study proposes a framework that demonstrates that tourism to TAST-related sites is complex and nuanced because it relates to the nature of the historic event itself, intrinsic qualities of TAST-related sites in terms of current relevance and the closeness of the event or site to each stakeholder.     

Inheriting slavery: making sense of a difficult heritage

In 1807, the British parliament decreed the abolition of the slave trade; since then, the places connected with the slave trade have physically ‘inherited’ its material traces and have become emotionally charged with historical memory. This article looks at the material inheritance of slavery and the challenges of its interpretation in historical sites, through the use of sound. Specifically, the article focuses on the Clifton National Heritage Park, an old slave plantation in Nassau (New Providence Island, Bahamas), and its interpretation via soundscapes. We will argue that the inheritance of slavery, as cultural trauma and collective memory, is ‘a form of remembrance’ that impact on identity formation: this can be interpreted, re-appropriated and attributed new meanings, for the benefits of both local and non-local communities.     

Heritage tourism and New Western history: a narrative analysis of six Colorado museums

Museums are important in heritage tourism, often presenting interconnected national, regional, and local histories. This article explores how six Colorado museums present state and regional identities. I ask how these museums have attempted to incorporate insights from ‘New Western’ History into their exhibits. New Western historians have called attention to the ‘legacies of conquest’ – the peoples displaced, the cultures destroyed, and the environments damaged by Anglo-American colonization of western lands – and offered critical and dissonant ‘counter-narratives’ of the region’s past. However, the region’s heritage tourism – a significant and growing industry – has emphasized more conventional narratives of settlement and economic progress. This study applies narrative theory to analyze how these critical histories are presented to tourists in Colorado museums and historic sites. Narrative theory examines how objects, texts, and media are shaped into stories, in this case stories linking popular readings of heritage to critical understandings of past events. Six case studies indicate that critical histories are presented in some sites, but are rarely the central focus of these attractions. However, the spatial juxtaposition of narratives and counter-narratives in these museums offers insight into how critical and dissonant history is beginning to be incorporated into heritage tourism in the American West.     

Supplanting the Planters

Summary

After briefly examining the plantation-as-hotel model, this contribution focuses the remainder of its attention on the conversion of plantation slavery into entertainment on the Caribbean island of Barbados. First, and by way of contextualization, it is shown that an extensive and well-documented history of plantation life exists, one that is drawn from early accounts of travelers, missionaries and others, as well as later expert commentaries offered by indigenous and extra-regional scholars. Second, it is argued that the tourism industry has largely ignored or been highly selective in borrowing from this rich source of material in its attempt to supply the sort of a-historical diversion which it believes its clientele enjoys. Examples provided include the Open House Programme of the Barbados National Trust, the annual Crop Over Festival and Plantation Spectacular dinner shows. Finally, a few suggestions are advanced in order to try and understand the success of this type of tourism. They include references to postmodernity, nostalgia, dark tourism and varieties of promotion.     

Museums as narrators: heritage trails in a digital era

ABSTRACT

In today’s tourism industry, merely offering tourists a variety of cultural events is not enough. Fully understanding their desire for an experience is the key. The attraction value increases if tourists can become personally involved and be affected by the narratives involved in place-making. This article examines the connections and cooperation among museums in a region where an important heritage trail is operating. When the old Telemark Canal was active (1892–1990), this enabled important products to be shipped from the upper mountainous areas to the coastal urban region in Telemark County, Norway. Shortly after being closed, the canal was transformed into a heritage trail and tourist attraction through renovation initiatives. Based on a closer examination of two of the attraction clusters along the heritage trail of the canal, we ask whether there is a key narrative that can link the local museums and cultural centres in the canal region. The discussion will consider how the widespread use of the internet has created new options for museums and cultural centres to benefit from neighbouring tourist attractions such as heritage trails.     

One museum,two stories: Place identity at the Hong Kong Museum of History

Tourism academia has attempted to individually explore the concepts of visiting experience, place identity, narratives, and history museums, but it has rarely delved into the deep and sometimes murky waters of the intimate connection among these notions. Focusing on the Museum of History in present-day identity torn Hong Kong, the current study sheds light on the identitarian and ideological implications visiting this museum has for Hong Kong born-and-raised Millennials. The findings challenge the current understanding of place identity at heritage sites of contested identity by revealing the subtle, sensitive, and fluid connections between individual and official narratives, and also among the investigated concepts. They also raise important critical assumptions about the politics of museography.     

Craft museum visitors’ interactive experiences,benefits and behavioural intentions: perspectives of Chinese parents

ABSTRACT

Family visitors are important audiences for museums. This paper develops a model that examines the influence of Chinese family visitors’ leisure experiences in museums on their behavioural intentions (BI) with their perceived benefits (mindful benefits and non-mindful benefits, MB and NMB) as the mediating variables. Based on the theoretical framework of an interactive experience model, parents’ experiences in museums were divided into experience of existential authenticity (interaction with the exhibits) (EA) and experience of parents-children interaction (PCI). A total of 375 local family visitors at a cluster of craft museums in Hangzhou, China participated in the survey. The PLS-SEM analysis indicates that both EA and PCI have positive effects on perceived benefits. EA, which emphasises the personal interactions between visitors and exhibited objects as well as their intangible meanings, is found to be more powerful than PCI in shaping visitors’ BI. MB and NMB differ in their influence on visitors’ behaviours. Only MB is linked with visitors’ BI. Further, MB partially mediates the relationship between EA and BI, and fully mediates the relationship between PCI and BI. Implications are offered to enhance family visitors’ experiences through appropriate service management strategies.     

Sources of Slavery-Destinations of Slavery

Summary

This study seeks to account for differences between the UK and US in including sites of black slavery as part of their heritage tourism and museum agenda. Both countries were heavily involved in the slave trade and both currently have immigrant communities with an appreciation of their origins. However, and unlike the American situation, it is only recently that Britain has opened the contentious issue of slavery to public gaze. In this regard, attention focuses specifically on the mounting of a pioneering Slave Exhibition at Liverpool's Maritime Museum and, by interviewing its chief curator, various insights are gained as to the potential and pitfalls of such a permanent display of an inglorious past. Further interpretation is added by references to the general literature on heritage tourism, the emerging context of “thanatourism” and the framework of a Force Field model that can usefully accommodate the competing interests of rival stakeholders.     

‘My dark heaven’: Hidden voices in orphanage tourism

Literature on orphanage tourism considers the motives of Western volunteers and the problematic nature of their compulsion to ‘help’ vulnerable children in the Global South. Orphanage tourism is also increasingly adopted into ‘rescue ideologies’ (Howard, 2016) and anti-trafficking/‘modern slavery’ campaigns. The perspectives of children involved, however, are missing from these discourses. This article draws on original empirical data to explore the narratives of young Nepali adults who lived in Kathmandu orphanages as children. Through these narratives, the article explores the diverse complexities of the residents' experiences of volunteer tourism and NGO ‘rescue’, and the shortcomings of recent ‘neoabolitionist’ frameworks. The article argues that such framings are routinely oversimplified and that a more nuanced and contextualised empirical exploration is urgently needed.