Southern hospitality and the politics of African American belonging: an analysis of North Carolina tourism brochure photographs

Abstract

Building upon James “Pete” Shortridge's appreciation for the multiple and contradictory meanings associated with the portrayal of regions, we explore the racial politics of representation within the American South and actively link the study of regional identity with a concern for social justice and African American belonging. Our study of the American South, a region with a long history of limiting if not altogether denying the right of African Americans to travel, exposes the racial inequalities that characterize the seemingly harmless arena of southern hospitality and tourism promotion. Although the power to be seen is an important cultural right, African Americans are frequently made invisible in photographs published in North Carolina tourism brochures. In framing the region in this fashion, these brochures communicate powerful ideas about who is most welcome and, conversely, who is not. Our examination of brochures indicates that some communities are attempting to make a place for African Americans, but there are clear limits in the extent to which promoters are willing to racially re-code travel spaces.

Keywords:

• regional identity
• belonging
• African American
• tourism
• social justice
• photography

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Acknowledgements

This paper is based on research funded, in part, by the Center for Sustainable Tourism, East Carolina University. We wish to thank Donna and Tyler Alderman for assisting in the collection of tourism brochures. This research was conducted as part of RESET (Race, Ethnicity, and Social Equity in Tourism), a multi-university and interdisciplinary outreach and research initiative based out of East Carolina University and the University of Tennessee (tourismreset.org).

Notes

1. Although Shortridge is well known for his work on the place- and region-defining power of novels and popular literature, he has also explored the representational importance of photography. See Shortridge (2000).

2. The American South, as we think about it here, refers to the former states of the Confederacy, which also served as the early battlegrounds for the Civil Rights Movement and continue to be characterized by intense, racialized struggles over political and cultural rights from the perspective of African Americans.

3. A person trip is one person on one trip traveling 50 miles or more from home one way. Data on African American person trips resulted from a 2002 survey of 300,000 American households by the Travel Industry Association of America.

4. Admittedly, there is a danger in focusing too intently on the relationship between the number of African Americans living within and visiting North Carolina and their relative visibility in tourist brochures. Social justice in cultural representation cannot be reduced simply to a matter of proportions. By pointing to numerical inequities between the limited presence of African Americans in travel marketing and their clear social and demographic importance, we seek to show illegitimacy of these patterns rather than prescribe any normative idea about what percentage of brochure photographs should depict African Americans.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Derek H. Alderman

Derek H. Alderman is Professor and Head of the Department of Geography at the University of Tennessee, Burchfiel Geography Building, Knoxville, TN 37996-0925, USA. Phone: [phone]