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ABSTRACT
This article argues that slavery and racial terror continue to haunt the narrative of the nation state. Through an analysis of Louisiana’s plantation sites and tours the authors examine the presence of black absence in their visual organization. We suggest that the historical but hereto little explored connection between the plantation site and the city of New Orleans is one that continues into the present day through Louisiana’s tourist economy. Thinking beyond western notions of archival knowledge that privilege text and materiality this article brings into relief the presence of black absence in Louisiana’s plantation and urban spaces. Doing so illuminates the ways in which white dominance has marked and organized narratives of the nation state as presented through plantation sites and tours.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Similar to how juridical procedures were used to display white dominance over and at the expense of black bodies, such as the Black Codes and Jim Crow, the New Orleans monuments, which were erected between 1884 and 1915, served as a symbolic response of white dominance against black existence in the public sphere. These monuments were permanent reminders that space was marked as white regardless of the constitutional efforts to incorporate black Americans into politics proper during Reconstruction. The most prominent of the monuments was that of Robert E. Lee, who sat atop a 60-foot pedestal on the city’s famed Lee Circle on the city’s famed Saint Charles Avenue. The statue of P.G.T. Beauregard stood at the entrance of the popular City Park, and that of Jefferson Davis at the intersection of Jefferson Davis Parkway and Canal Street. The monument to the Battle of Liberty Place stood at the foot of Canal Street; this was the only of the monuments that stood at a remote location upon the mandated removals because the city’s financial and government center had relocated as the city grew outward.
The battle itself was the culmination of antiblack violence in efforts to suppress black voting which was followed by a series of terrorist acts that included the death of one hundred and fifty black residents and fifty taken as prisoners. The newly organized Crescent City White League attempted a siege of the city in protest of Louisiana’s Reconstruction government and black integration in 1874, when they confronted the New Orleans Metropolitan Police. By the time the federal troops arrived the White League fled and not one insurgent was prosecuted. This concluding factor reveals the significance of the memorial as the public performance of white power whose continuance rests against black life.
2 There has been a variety of media attention surrounding confederate statues in public spaces in recent years. For our purposes, however, we want to highlight how these statues were built to designate space as not only white but also to signify how space is defined as anti-black; black in this sense stands excluded from public space.
3 Among the articles see Woodward Citation2018, The New York Times Citation2017, Fausset Citation2017, The Times-Picayune Citation2017.
4 For an example of this literature see Sublette Citation2009, Powell Citation2013, Clark Citation2015. Clark in particular notes that despite exoticized metaphors for New Orleans that “quadroons,” or free mixed-race women, became, their social and familial structures were not much different than those of other black women in the U.S. South.
5 While there is overlap within the various categories--plantation tours and museums and heritage tourism in the U.S. South, the issues of each reflect the concerns of specific fields. The literature on heritage tourism in the U.S. South is vast, as is the literature on plantation tours and museums in Louisiana and cultural tourism in New Orleans. It is also one written by scholars from a variety of fields and which employs a variety of methodologies that draw from the fields of Anthropology, English, History, Performance Studies, Sociology, and, especially, Geography.
For discussions on heritage tourism in the U.S. South (and Caribbean) as it specifically relates to slavery and the enslaved, see Eichstedt and Small Citation2002, Butler Citation2001, Alderman and Modlin Citation2008, Butler et al. Citation2008, Alderman and Campbell Citation2008. For a discussion of plantation tours and museums see Shields Citation2017, Commander Citation2018, Litvin and Brewer Citation2008, Modlin Citation2011. For a broader discussion of the literature, see Alderman Citation2011. For a discussion slavery and public history, see Horton and Horton Citation2008, Trouillot Citation2008, Burns Citation2013.
6 In addition to Roach, for a discussion on how performance cultivates colonial history, circulates and transforms cultural identities across the Americas see Taylor Citation2003; for a discussion on tourism, the body, and performance, see Pezzullo Citation2007, and Bowman and Pezzulo Citation2010.
7 The families that settled the area first arrived as refugees to New Orleans in the 1760s after the Seven Years War displaced them from Nova Scotia. In 1768 Spanish Governor Antonio de Ulloa ordered that these families settle the Natchez region. They remained between empires until Louisiana was incorporated into the Union in 1803.
8 The Mississippi River naturally shifted course as its streams and tributaries were “captured” by other rivers. This was a natural occurrence until river control systems were introduced as new settlers arrived. Beginning in the early to mid-twentieth century, these control systems were overseen by government and private enterprises.
9 See the Oak Alley website: https://www.oakalleyplantation.org/learn-explore/history/enslaved. Last accessed 5/21/2018.
10 The Spanish facilitated the enslavement of indigenous peoples under the 1603 Requerimiento, a legal document that mandated Christianity of indigenous inhabitants. Failure to comply by indigenous residents granted the Spanish a legal reason to indenture or enslave individuals in exchange for proselytizing in the region. Demographic decline, migration, and European expansion, along with Christianity and solidifying racial hierarchies, soon shifted the focus away from indigenous slavery and indenture and onto African slavery.
11 The French ceded its territories west of the Mississippi, plus New Orleans, to Spain during the French and Indian War in 1762. The French would reacquire New Orleans in 1801 and hold it until the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 transferred the territory to the United States.
12 The fire destroyed 856 of 1,100 structures and much of the French architecture of New Orleans. Property losses included commercial, religious and government buildings as well as residential dwellings.
13 Despite its reintroduction sugar would never again reach nineteenth-century levels.
14 See the Oak Alley website: https://www.oakalleyplantation.com/learn-explore/history. Last accessed 5/21/2018.
15 Aime purchased the property, known simply as “Section 7” in Parish records, in 1830, during the height of sugar production.
16 Oak Alley has made their records and archives available, including in digital format. See http://www.oakalleyplantation.com/learn-explore/history. Last accessed 5/20/2018.
17 The literature on heritage tours and slavery discusses the ways in which guides, docents, and other plantation tour and museum staff play important roles in shaping visitors’ experiences through their narrative tales. For an example see Modlin Citation2008 and Modlin et al. Citation2011.
18 Beginning in the nineteenth century and extending into the present day, tourism in New Orleans has capitalized on an exceptionalist and exoticized narrative of its history. For a discussion of the development of the tourist industry New Orleans, see Stanonis Citation2006 and Souther Citation2006. For a discussion of the exotic in New Orleans tourism, see Gotham Citation2002 and Gotham Citation2007. Since 2005, when Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, eco-tourism and disaster tourism have emerged as powerful new industries. See for example the Special Issue of American Quarterly, edited by Clyde Woods (Citation2009) and especially Thomas Citation2009, Hartnell Citation2009, Pezzullo Citation2010, Gould and Lewis Citation2007.
19 These include, among others: NOLA Voodoo Tours, Ghost Tours, Vampire Tours, Haunted Nola Tours, and Cemetery Tours. The tours are offered through an amalgam of companies. The authors would like to mark a difference between the popular haunted and ghost story tours we are describing here and the city’s walking history tours, which include mandatory training for guides and which the authors have not explored.
20 For other examples see Camp Citation2004 and Scott Citation2008.
21 Laura is advertised as a “Creole” plantation, and Evergreen maintains row-style slave quarters.
22 See the Whitney Plantation website: http://whitneyplantation.com. Last accessed 5/25/2018.
23 The 1935 Works Progress Administration (WPA) was part of Roosevelt’s program to relieve the effects of the Great Depression. It employed thousands of previously jobless individuals, including in the Federal Writers’ Project, led by the noted folklorist John Lomax, and taxed with collecting the oral history of different segments of the American population, including formerly enslaved individuals. Their interviews resulted in the creation of the Slave Narrative Collection that serves as the primary-source material for the exhibit’s sculptures.
24 See the Whitney Plantation website: http://whitneyplantation.com. Accessed 5/25/2018.
25 Studies of plantation tours in Louisiana (as well as in Georgia and North Carolina, which are also popular plantation-home tour destinations) have previously highlighted this omission and the prevailing emphasis on the antebellum lives of plantation owners. See for example Shields Citation2017, Butler Citation2001, Commander Citation2018, Alderman Citation2011, Miles Citation2017.
26 It remains to be seen whether new or alternative tours will be established in light of the controversy surrounding the removal of Confederate monuments. At the time that this essay was written, however, the silence around the monuments remained.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Lisa B.Y. Calvente
Lisa B. Y. Calvente is a Communication and Cultural Studies scholar. Her interests lie in the critical interrogation of anti-black and brown racism and the experiences, representations and theories of the Black Diaspora and coloniality. She is co-editor of Imprints of Revolution: Visual Representations of Resistance (Roman & Littlefield International 2016) and contributor to journals and multiauthor volumes in her field.
Guadalupe García
Guadalupe García is Associate Professor of History at Tulane University. She specializes in colonialism, cities, and the urban histories of Latin America and the Caribbean. Her first book on colonial Havana is entitled Beyond the Walled City: Colonial Exclusion in Havana and was published with the University of California Press in 2016. She is also the co-editor, with Lisa B.Y. Calvente, of Imprints of Revolution: Visual Representations of Resistance.