![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
Abstract
This article draws on the author’s 2009 tour of South Carolina’s Magnolia Plantation as a primary text to examine how nostalgia for the 19th-century plantation and the Lost Cause Confederacy continues to limit entangled understandings of the past. Plantation tourism reveals how participants negotiate the layers of the past and the present—bringing in new and tense forms of engagement with a dismissal of the past (and present), of consuming it, and of rewriting one’s heritage. These tours’ audience ranges from those haunted by the past to those who want to celebrate the ubiquitous idea of “the gallant South.” The erasure and containment of the site’s horror indicate how tour operators profit from redeployments of the South. The plantation’s architecture, particularly the Big House, reverberates as a site of symbolic, political, and familial power. These aspects of tourism, nostalgia, and memory illuminate the palimpsestic presence of the plantation in daily life.
Notes
June 27 Newsome took down the flag. The flag was officially removed on July 10, after governor Nikki Haley signed the bill on Tuesday, July 7, which transferred it from the capital, where it had flown for 54 years, to a museum. Ralph Ellis, Ben Brumfield, and Meridith Edwards, “S.C. Governor Signs Bill to Remove Confederate Flag from Capitol Grounds,” CNN, July 10, 2015, http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/09/us/south-carolina-confederate-battle-flag/ (accessed June 20, 2016).
Rev. Clementa Pinckney (41), Cynthia Hurd (54), Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton (45), Tywanza Sanders (26), Ethel Lance (70), Susie Jackson (87), Depayne Middleton Doctor (49), Rev. Daniel Simmons (74), and Myra Thompson (59).
Roof’s desires mirror those of the Knights Party, whose Soldiers of the Cross (SOTC) Summer Institute counseled: “Most white people, still don’t get it! … Their sensitivity has been made numb by television, schools and the church which has convinced them that it [racial pride and separation] really doesn’t matter. This mass deception has thoroughly penetrated and corrupted the ability for critical thinking causing people to repeat inane nonsense as if it were the Wisdom of Solomon. … “Diversity is our Strength” … “Guns cause violence” … “There is no such thing as race.” Using the Bible, white nationalism, and selected historical moments, the SOTC Summer Institute argues that, “The current political system embraces ideals, teachings and concepts that are completely foreign to our values, morals and justice. What is evil has now been called good and that which is good is now called evil. Where will it end?” (from: http://sotctraininginstitute.com/?page_id=45, accessed June 20, 2015).
Laura Miller, “Behind Dylann Roof’s Race War,” Salon, June 24, 2015, http://www.salon.com/2015/06/24/behind_dylann_roofs_race_war_the_highly_motivated_secret_white_supremacy_movement_working_toward_the_battle_of_armageddon/ (accessed June 23, 2016).
“Here’s What Appears to Be Dylann Roof’s Racist Manifesto,” Mother Jones, June 20, 2015, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/06/alleged-charleston-shooter-dylann-roof-manifesto-racist (accessed June 23, 2016).
He chastises others white nationalists to “stop” their vitriol against white women in interracial relationships because these women “can be saved.” Most frustrating and troubling is Roof’s historical assessment that “if it was all it [sic] true, it would make it so much easier for me to accept our current situation.” He accepts that “if” true, this history would help him accept contemporary realities, but he refutes documented facts. Roof’s emphasis on the conditional (if) brings together his racial and gendered identity.
Robin DiAngelo, “White Fragility,” International Journal of Critical Pedagogy 3, no. 3 (2011): 54. DiAngelo also mentions segregation, entitlement to racial comfort, racial arrogance, and the idea of whiteness as the universal default as factors that support white fragility, 58–63.
Caroline E. Janney, “The Lost Cause,” Encyclopedia Virginia, Online, http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/lost_cause_the#start_entry (accessed June 24, 2016).
“Here’s What Appears to Be Dylann Roof’s Racist Manifesto,” Mother Jones, June 20, 2015, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/06/alleged-charleston-shooter-dylann-roof-manifesto-racist (accessed June 23, 2016).
Harriette Kershaw Leiding, Historic Houses of South Carolina (Philadelphia: JB Lippincott Company, 1921), 204.
Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996), xvi.
Ibid., 4.
Philip L. Riechel, “The Misplaced Emphasis on Urbanization in Police Development,” Policing and Society 3, no. 1 (1992): 4.
Ibid., 4–8.
Ibid., 4.
Antoinette T. Jackson, Speaking for the Enslaved: Heritage Interpretation at Antebellum Plantation Sites (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press Inc., 2012), 23.
Jessica Adams, Wounds of Returning: Race, Memory and Property on the Postslavery Plantation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 59; David L. Butler, “Whitewashing Plantations: The Commodification of a Slave-Free Antebellum South,” in Slavery, Contested Heritage and Thanatourism, edited by Graham M. S. Dann and A. V. Seaton (New York: Haworth Press Inc., 2001), 168–73.
Magnolia Plantation website: http://www.magnoliaplantation.com/slaverytofreedom.html (accessed June 25, 2016).
Adams, Wounds of Returning, discusses spectacles of the owners’ social and economic power replayed within plantation tourism, 54.
For other versions of this discussion see Towns’ and Williams’ contributions in this issue.
Adams, Wounds of Returning, 54.
Tiya Miles, Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 78, 115–19. Miles documents how “ghost tourism” is one place where stories of enslaved people can be front and center. Miles notes that these stories are often invented, built on reproducing trauma to black female bodies and filled with distortions on African-based spiritual practice, particularly Voodoo.
Suzanne Sherman, “Will History Only Remember the Founders as Slaveowners?” The American Conservative, April 18, 2016, http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/will-history-only-remember-the-founders-as-slaveowners/ (accessed May 16, 2016).
Natasha Tretheway, “Enlightenment,” Thrall, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/57697 (accessed June 20, 2016).
In the poem “Knowledge,” also in Thrall, Tretheway explores what it is like for one’s father to contemplate his “cross bred child.”.
The Oxford English Dictionary, Online, Np, http://www.oed.com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/ (accessed October 20, 2015).
Adams, Wounds of Returning, 5.
Ibid., 6.
Magnolia Plantation website: http://www.magnoliaplantation.com/magnolia_history.html (accessed June 24, 2016).
Staff writers, “Fernanda de Mohrenschildt Hastie of Magnolia Plantation and Gardens, dies at 94,” Post and Courier, April 17, 2013, http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20130417/PC16/130419371/fernanda-de-mohrenschildt-hastie-of-magnolia-plantation-and-gardens-dies-at-94 (accessed October 31, 2015).
See David Blight’s Race and Reunion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). He argues that literature has been used to reinvent the U.S. South. Through tragic, yet plucky plantation heroines like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind and other romances of Southern courage during the Civil War, literature has been used to create an emotional space of identification with Southerners. Readers come to admire and respect these characters for their courage in confronting oppressive, greedy, and crafty Northerners. This sympathetic reading of the South, Blight contends, has meant that Southern whites have reframed a war about slavery as a racist economic system into one about state’s rights and white courage. The erasure of the economic and racial rationale for enslavement creates the space for white Southern nobility that has had an enduring life, chapter 7.
Anthony Payne and Paul Sutton, Charting Caribbean Development (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), 8.
Adams discusses plantation landscapes as palimpsests, Wounds of Returning, 4.
Miles, Tales from the Haunted South, argues that ghost stories are a history making method. Ghost stories are ‘unsuccessful repression’ that “call to mind historical knowledge that we feel compelled to face. They also contain the threat of that knowledge by marking it as unbelievable,” 15.
Graham M. S. Dann and A. V. Seaton, eds., “Slavery, Contested Heritage and Thanatourism,” in Slavery, Contested Heritage and Thanatourism (New York: Haworth Press Inc., 2001), 24.
Richard Sharpley quoted in Miles, Tales from the Haunted South, 10.
While there are critiques of Holocaust Studies, I am most captivated by the notion of the “hinge generation” rather than a debate on the entire course of study.
Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 1.
Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 5, emphasis in original.
Frantz Fanon’s work, particularly The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skins, White Masks discusses trauma and the colonial project in various ways. Fanon’s work should be central in work on trauma and the African diaspora. Space limitations prevent me from engaging with it here.
Many academics dismiss Joy DeGruy’s “post traumatic slave syndrome,” which is the “residual impacts of generations of slavery and opens up the discussion of how the black community can use the strengths we have gained in the past to heal in the present,” http://joydegruy.com/resources-2/post-traumatic-slave-syndrome/ (accessed June 20, 2016). Although controversial, epigenetics, or the supposition that genetic material changes with trauma, seems to be a new articulation of post traumatic slave syndrome. “Scientists commonly compare the epigenetic function to an on/off switch for a person’s DNA. According to this analogy, if your genome includes inheritable asthma, the epigenome determines if the asthma is ‘on’ or not. The study of epigenetics has demonstrated that certain kinds of stresses—such as famine, war, or pollution—may flip the on/off switch in a way that lasts for multiple generations” (from http://oregonhumanities.org/magazine/start-summer-2014/before-you-know-it/749/; accessed June 20, 2016). The daily brutality inflicted on black bodies makes me consider the idea of the hinge and what generational trauma might mean in black communities. I draw the line at the idea that such trauma is encoded in one’s DNA and thus transferred genetically.
See Brazil and Colombia and the black movements within those countries, particularly Keisha-Khan Y. Perry’s Black Women Against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
I like thinking about how the past is layered and bleeds through each representation. In a later panel, one scholar at the Association for the Study of Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) conference (11/15) mentioned “to palimpsest.” In other words, using palimpsest as a verb. That’s not what I want to do. I invoke a more traditional understanding of its usage here.
For instance, Adams discusses Oak Alley as specifically giving tourists a Gone with the Wind–style experience, Mint Juleps; while the Whitney Museum is geared toward African Americans with its emphasis on enslaved lives. I find the Whitney’s brand/layer of truth/narrative an obvious ploy to African American consumers. It was a shallow experience with a few “shocking” moments deployed to seem like more. While that was my experience, I have heard from many who find the experience profound.
James Loewen, Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong (New York: New Press/W.W. Norton, 1999). Loewen argues that every historical site tells two stories—one of the historical event it commemorates and one of the era in which it is erected. “To understand a historic site we need to know when its interpretation—what the guides show and tell—was established. Why was this story told then? What audience was it aimed at? How would the story differ if we were telling it today? Or in another fifty years? Too often our historic sites relate inaccurate and misleading history owing to the ideological demands of the time and the purpose of their erection or preservation,” 36.
Wood, Black Majority, 35–62.
Tanya Shields, Bodies and Bones: Feminist Rehearsal and Imagining Caribbean Belonging (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014).
Warren Alleyne and Henry Fraser, eds., The Barbados-Carolina Connection (London: Macmillan Publishers, 1988), 42–46.
Magnolia Plantation website: http://www.magnoliaplantation.com/ (accessed May 20, 2016).
Scholars from Edward Baptist to Paul Finkelman have argued for changes in vocabulary to reframe our understandings of the past. Baptist has called for labor camps instead of plantations in The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. Finkelman maintains that instead of the “Compromise of 1850, we should call that agreement the “Appeasement of 1850,” http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/proposal-change-vocabulary-we-use-when-talking-about-civil-war-180956547/ (accessed June 24, 2016).
One ASWAD audience member, Sandra Richards, shared that it was rare for antebellum families to have strangers on their walls. She speculated that these might be light-skinned black family members. When Richards asked me how I knew the portraits are of white women, I responded with, “that’s what I was told.” Actually, no one specified their race. It was my assumption and I would argue the assumption of the docents, property managers, and of the tour itself. Richards’ question nonetheless raises an interesting point for consideration. It is provocative to think about Richards’ assertion in the final bedroom with Mammy’s image across from the portrait of a white woman. Richards has also written about heritage tourism; see, “Space, Water, Memory: Slavery and Beaufort, South Carolina,” Cultural Dynamics 21, no. 3 (2009): 255–82.
DiAngelo, “White Fragility,” 60. Part of the counternarrative that whites invoke is their own sense of victimhood by any challenge to the narratives they have been told or are telling (64).
Daguerreotypes were expensive and a marker of a family’s wealth. Black women were often photographed with their white charges. Rarely are black women photographed by themselves, but the image labeled, “Mammy of Magnolia Plantation” shows a woman by herself on the lawn.
Miles, Tales from the Haunted South, 107.
Grewal defines consumer nationalism as the commodification and consumption of various markers and ideologies of the state. In essence, belonging is based on consuming and participation in the market rather than traditional rights and responsibilities. For example, in the post-9/11 United States, patriotism manifested based on what one buys—flags, flag pins, t-shirts—as well as embracing notions of a singular “American” (U.S.) identity. She attributes this manifestation of citizenship to the neoliberal project in which markets have primacy, there is a retreat from the commons, privatization, weak unions, and delimited state power.
In my experience, plantations owned by the National Park Service go to great lengths to provide a nuanced story. For example, the Kingston Plantation in Florida, once owned by Anna Jai Kingsley, a former slave-cum-slave owner, emphasizes in its self-guided tour that no matter race, slave owning was appalling. Self-guided tour taken June 18, 2016.
Kevin Noble Maillard, “A Father’s Struggle to Stop His Daughter’s Adoption,” The Atlantic, July 7, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/paternity-registry/396044/ (accessed June 20, 2016). Although this article is about the rights of unmarried fathers in adoption cases, Christopher Emmanuel’s case illustrates the continued consequences of interracial sex in South Carolina.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Tanya Shields
Tanya Shields is an Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Bodies and Bones: Feminist Rehearsal and Imagining Caribbean Belonging (2014) and editor of The Legacy of Eric Williams: Into the Postcolonial Moment (2015). Dr. Shields is currently at work on her second monograph, “Gendered Labor: Race, Place and Power on Female-Owned Plantations,” a comparative study of women who owned plantations in the Caribbean and U.S. South.