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.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Derek Alderman and David Butler for including his research in this special issue and for their helpful suggestions during the review process.
Notes on the contributor
Matthew R. Cook is a Ph.D. candidate in Geography at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. His dissertation research focuses on critical historical geographies of slavery in the US ‘Deep South’ states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The overarching goal of the dissertation is to study the processes through which counter-narratives of slavery are formed, operate, and can be advanced.
Notes
1 Though certainly not an exhaustive list, many of the key works to come out of this period of research on slavery across geography, history, memory studies, and tourism studies include Adams (Citation1999, Citation2007), Alderman (Citation2010), Alderman and Campbell (Citation2008), Alderman and Modlin (Citation2008), Berlin (Citation2004, Citation2006), Butler (Citation2001), Buzinde (Citation2010), Buzinde and Santos (Citation2009), Carter, Butler, and Alderman (Citation2014), Crutcher (Citation2008), Dwyer, Butler, and Carter (Citation2013), Eichstedt and Small (Citation2002), Horton and Horton (Citation2006), McKittrick (Citation2011, Citation2013), Modlin (Citation2008), Modlin, Alderman, and Gentry (Citation2011), and Small (Citation2013).
2 LaCapra (Citation2004) and Dean's (Citation2004) research comprise the core of what Moyn (Citation2006) calls a new ‘school of thought’ that considers empathy to be the new, enlightened cultural imperative in the post-Holocaust world.
3 The author's personal website, on which he posted his observations and notes from fieldwork, is http://matt-cook.com.
4 Having already read about the museum in an Al Jazeera America article (Parker, Citation2014), I knew that David Dreyer, a docent and local historian, could point me to several counter-narratives presented in the museum and give me more information about the collection and its history than was simply presented on signs throughout the museum.
5 These plantations included Oak Alley, Laura, Houmas House, San Francisco, and Whitney. I personally was part of the teams that worked at Oak Alley and Whitney.
6 In 1452, Pope Nicholas V's decree Dum Diversas granted Portugal the exclusive right to trade with Africa, which included trading for slaves. Under Dum Diversas, Portugal was given authority to enslave ‘pagans’ such as Africans in perpetuity.
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Funding
The author also thanks Derek Alderman for his assistance with funding the fieldwork upon which this research is based. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [grant number 1359780].
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