Guest Editor’s Note

It is still impossible to get into the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) without buying a ticket months in advance. The website explains: “The historic significance and high visibility of the Museum are attracting an unprecedented number of local, national, and international visitors.”¹ The Museum’s significance is further modeled by its glimmering, imposing building with the Washington Monument visible from every angle. I was not lucky enough to get into the museum at its much-celebrated inauguration but the fact that so many people are scrambling to see it speaks to the currency of Black heritage as a site for tourist consumption in the current moment. Excitement over the museum is an indicator of the interest among some to have Black culture and history—the horrors and the highlights—featured grandly as a mark of public affirmation of Blackness.

Contrast this with the image on the front of this journal’s cover. The scrawling of KKK across a monument that recognizes Black soldiers for their pioneering participation in a Civil War battle that is a little-known part of how the “west was won.” I photographed that image in 2004 when I went on a tour of Black towns in Oklahoma, which is the subject of my article for this issue. Four of us on the small private tour of Black heritage in Oklahoma stood awkwardly silent as we noticed the three letters of hate that appeared burned into the stone pillar. They took up a full third of the structure and obstructed the message to honor Black men who fought for the nation. Even the tour guide, who had led this tour route a number of times and had not seen this before, was speechless.

When considered against the NMAAHC, the Civil War battle monument is dwarfed—an approximately 10 foot narrow stone pillar on a field in Oklahoma to the NMAAHC’s broad and tall reach in the nation’s capital. But the monument’s message was clearly too large for someone(s) who wanted to snuff out a narrative of Black success and contribution to the United States. The juxtaposition of the grand and embraced NMAAHC and the KKK-defaced monument is a way to orient this collection of articles on Blackness and Tourism. Across the pieces in this issue is an over-arching theme: within varied forms of tourism in which people of African descent are featured, there are multiple negotiations, contestations, struggles, and assertions over the presence, inclusion, and encounter with Blackness—sometimes multiple Blacknesses. With articles that focus on the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean, we highlight work by scholars in anthropology, communication studies, ethnic studies, and women’s studies who examine plantation tours, community-organized tours, community performances, Black women’s vacation travel, and tours of Civil War sites. The articles point to the broad range of politics associated with incorporating, making visible, and having the right to determine how to present Black stories, histories, communities and agency in a range of tourism and travel forms.

We first began exploring these issues at the 2015 conference of the Association for the Study of Worldwide African Diaspora, which included two separate but related panels: Tourism, Development, and the Global African Diaspora and Touring the Black Subject: Counter Narratives, Space, and Performance. Upon realizing our mutual interests in interrogating the implications of the contemporary phenomenon of touring Black bodies, communities, and histories across the African diaspora, we came together to develop this special issue. We were cognizant of the fact that a scholarly collection of articles on tourism and Blacks in the Americas did not exist. There are a number of monographs and individual articles and book chapters on Blacks and tourism, ranging from roots tourism, plantation tourism, civil rights tourism, and blues tourism. Civil rights, blues, and plantation tourisms are, in part, excursions into America’s history of race within particular institutions and events. The work on roots tourism, especially African American “pilgrimages” to Africa or sites that stand as a kind of Black homeland, has increasingly explored the marketing, political economy, and racialized meanings within these events as well as the qualitative experience of the encounter between African Americans and their Black counterparts in Africa or elsewhere.² Much has also been written about tourism in the Caribbean regarding gender and race inequalities and constructions that are at the root of the region’s most lucrative industry and part of a global political economic arrangement.³ And there is recent work on post-disaster tourism in places like New Orleans⁴ as well on dark tourism in plantation sites.⁵

But we are not aware of an edited volume or journal issue that brings together cases across a range of regions and contexts within the African diaspora, especially in the Americas, to think through what tourism that purports to incorporate Black bodies, stories, communities, and histories looks like and does across the diaspora.⁶ We purposefully excluded work on tours to Africa as this is an area more heavily studied.⁷ Thus, our focus is the Americas—specifically Panama, Brazil, Jamaica, and the United States—where the histories of colonialism and plantation enslavement, coupled with postcolonial/post–civil rights arrangements, have given rise to complex tourism industries as well as grassroots projects. These tourism venues have rendered the histories, cultures, and communities of people of African descent either the object of the tourist gaze, the subject of tourist consumption, or the project for an alternative politics of tourism and community. In the Caribbean, mass tourism in which people of African descent are hosts or service workers was buoyed by air transportation and efforts for economic development as well as the region’s relationship with the United States.⁸ In the United States, tourism featuring Black people—especially heritage tourism—is more of a late 20th-century phenomenon. Reaching across this geographic terrain, the articles here help us think through the global currency and formation of Blackness within tourism as it manifests in the various sites. As such, this special issue on Blackness and Tourism makes an intervention and, we hope, begins to expand the parameters of tourism studies of people of African descent.⁹

The location of Blackness within tours of American history is addressed in two of the articles. A major theme in heritage tourism literature is what some call the “whitewashing of plantation tourism,”¹⁰ that is, downplaying Black life to privilege white life in tour narratives of plantation history.¹¹ We provide cases of this dynamic in plantation and nonplantation tours. Tanya Shields’s paper, “Magnolia Longing: The Plantation Tour as Palimpsest,” explores how the tour narrative at South Carolina’s Magnolia Plantation reflects a longing for the (white) southern plantation past to the near exclusion of the Black past in that space. For Black tourists this provides a recurrence of racial trauma – a palimpsest, with traces of the past seeping into the present. In my article, “Black Towns and the Civil War: Touring Battles of Race, Nation, and Place,” we also see Black American contributions to a major national event muted in conventional tour narratives of an Oklahoman Civil War battle site, which results in an idea of Blackness outside of the story of the nation.

The counter narrative that I also explore in my article points to a community-organized tour placing and narrating Blacks as economically and socially prominent in the battle site space. This raises another emphasis among our articles: resistance to Black marginality in tourism. In the cases that demonstrate this dynamic, Blacks are centered in the tour experience either as tourists or tour organizers and tour narrators. For example, discussing tours led by former gang leaders in “The ‘Lumpenproletariat’s Redemption’: Black Radical Potentiality and LA Gang Tours,” Armond R. Towns argues that gang leaders-cum-tour guides whose tours analyze Black Los Angeles represent a lumpenproletariat with revolutionary potential because they resist Black objecthood in their critique of the city’s assault on the Black community. In Carla Maria Guerrón Montero’s article, “‘To Preserve is to Resist’: Threading Black Cultural Heritage from within in Quilombo Tourism,” she discusses tourism among the Quilombo in Brazil, showing how community members have taken control of the narrative about their own community as part of a larger effort toward Quilombo sovereignty. And, in her creative writing piece, “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” Renée Alexander Craft demonstrates how the reenactment of enslaved people’s triumph as part of a Panamanian Carnival tradition is led by the performers as some aspects of the performance destabilize white tourists. Finally, in “‘Giving Back’ to Jamaica: Experiencing Community and Conflict while Traveling with Diasporic Heart,” Bianca C. Williams discusses a group of African American women vacationers who travel to Jamaica with a “diasporic heart,” mindful of forging space and a balanced relationship of respect with Black Jamaicans with whom they racially identify. In all four cases, people of African descent chart the course of the tour experience. In many instances they control how the story of Black people is told and they place Black lives at the forefront. In all cases, Black people create or attempt to create a tourist experience that avoids reproducing racial hierarchies in which Blacks and their life stories are sidelined. Thus, these four articles capture examples of self-determination, sovereignty, and investment in elevating Blacks’ status in ways that conventional tourism (especially, tourism that is state-produced or targeted for a mass audience for profit) rarely allows. Taken into consideration with the articles by Shields and Slocum, the articles across the issue reveal the greater likelihood of obscuring Blackness in tourisms that are not “grassroots” and self-determined by Black communities. Indeed, the articles signal not merely the greater visibility of people of African descent in tours led by Blacks; they also demonstrate how such tours produce challenges to racial inequality and offer demonstrations of Black worth.

What will be the future possibilities for centering Blackness in tourism so that, to use the term that so many of us now connect with, “Black lives matter”? And, what will that look like? At the writing of this introduction, Donald Trump was elected president amid a spate of racially charged attacks. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s first report on post-election hate incidents in the first week after the election cited anti-Black hate as the most prevalent.¹² North Carolina, where we met to develop this collection and review each other’s article drafts, was the site of hate graffiti that appeared on November 9 and read: “Black Lives Don’t Matter and Neither Does [sic] Your Votes.” A Ku Klux Klan group in the state has planned a rally to celebrate Trump’s election. The examples are by now nation-wide. We have before us an election that laid bare what so many have already argued was always there, namely (and of especial relevance here), a persistent investment in white supremacy and structures that uphold it.¹³ That “KKK” was etched across a heritage monument in 2004 provides evidence of such an investment that existed prior to the 2016 election. Our work exploring tourism in a variety of venues shows the ways that this history and foundation of the society is often denied or downplayed in tourism. At the same time, as we also show here, there are so many efforts to counter that narrative, to correct for it, challenge it, produce/participate in alternatives to it, and to vindicate. The work we see being done at the community level, through community institutions, and by individuals to theorize and reposition narratives of Blackness are the forms of resistance that may carry us forward.

Notes

“Timed Entry Passes,” https://nmaahc.si.edu/visit/passes (accessed November 18, 2016).

Paulla A. Ebron, “Tourists as Pilgrims: Commercial Fashioning of Transatlantic Politics,” American Ethnologist 26 (2000): 910–32; Edward Bruner, Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Kamari Clarke, “Mapping Transnationality: Roots Tourism and the Institutionalization of Ethnic Heritage,” in Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness, edited by M. Kamari Clarke and Deborah Thomas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 133–53; Patricia Pinho, “African American Roots Tourism in Brazil,” Latin American Perspectives 35 (2008): 70–86; Bayo Holsey, Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Alondra Nelson, The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations and Reconciliation after the Genome (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016); Jemima Pierre, The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

See especially: Kamela Kempadoo, Sexing the Caribbean: Gender, Race and Sexual Labour (New York: Routledge, 2004); Denise Brennan, What’s Love Got to Do with It?: Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Steven Gregory, The Devil Behind the Mirror: Globalization and Politics in the Dominican Republic (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006); L. Kaifa Roland, Cuban Color in Tourism and La Lucha: An Ethnography of Racial Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

Lynell Thomas, “‘Roots Run Deep Here’: The Construction of Black New Orleans in Post-Katrina Tourism Narratives,” American Quarterly 41 (2009): 749–68.

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).

Derek H. Alderman, “Introduction to the Special Issue: African Americans and Tourism, Tourism Geographies,” Tourism Geographies 15 (2013): 375–79.

Bruner, Culture on Tour; Ebbron, “Tourists as Pilgrims”; Holsey, Routes of Remembrance. See also Pierre, The Predicament of Blackness, for a critique of the limits of this work in considering the role of the state in “roots” tourism.

Mullings, Beverly. “Caribbean Tourism: Trouble in Paradise?” in Introduction to the Pan-Caribbean, edited by Tracey Skelton (London: Hodder Arnold, 1964).

In 2015, the African and African Diaspora Studies Program at Florida International University hosted the conference: “Roots/Heritage Tourism in Africa and the African Diaspora: Case Studies for a Comparative Approach.” The conference organizers have mentioned plans for the conference papers to be published in an edited volume.

David L. Butler, “Whitewashing Plantations: The Commodification of a Slave-Free Antebellum South,” International Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Administration 2 (2001): 163–75.

Jennifer Eichstedt and Stephen Small, Representations of Slavery: Race and Ideology in Southern Plantation Museums (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press, 2002); Butler, “Whitewashing Plantations”; Derek H. Alderman and Arnold Modlin, Jr., “(In)Visibility of the Enslaved Within Online Plantation Tourism Marketing: A Textual Analysis of North Carolina Websites,” Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing 25 (2008): 265–81. For work on how to undo the silences around Blacks’ plantation experiences, see Antoinette Jackson, Speaking for the Enslaved: Heritage Interpretation at Antebellum Plantation Sites (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2012).

Hatewatch Staff, “Over 200 Incidents of Hateful Harassment and Intimidation Since Election Day,” https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/11/11/over-200-incidents-hateful-harassment-and-intimidation-election-day (accessed November 20, 2016).

These arguments emerged especially on social media. I am thinking of Facebook pages by Dylan Rodriguez and Stacey Patton, for example. Articles addressing this have also been written by several scholars. See especially: thinking of various Facebook posts from Black intellectuals but also articles by Robin D. G. Kelley, “Trump Says Go Back, We-Say-Fight-Back,” Boston Review, November 15, 2016; Melissa Harris-Perry, “Democrats Have Questions, Black Women Are the Answer,” Elle, November 15, 2016.