Memory, slavery, and plantation museums: the River Road Project

ABSTRACT

Heritage tourism plays an increasingly important yet controversial role in interpreting the emotionally and politically charged memories and legacies of African enslavement. Antebellum plantation museums in the southeastern USA remain relatively underanalyzed by researchers, despite their tradition of ignoring and minimizing the contributions and struggles of the slave community. Yet, this neglect is being challenged somewhat by a growing number of plantations and counter-narrative sites that incorporate slavery into docent-led tours, promotional materials, exhibits, and preserved structures. Responding to a need for scholarship that can ferret out the nuances, complexities, and conflicts of producing and consuming heritage at these tourist sites, this special issue presents the results of a study of four plantations (Laura, Oak Alley, Houmas House, San Francisco) along Louisiana's River Road. The issue's editors and contributing authors address a central question: what factors, social actors, and interactions (social and spatial in nature) shape, facilitate, or even constrain the remembering of slavery at southern plantation museums, including those sites making seemingly significant progress in recovering the enslaved? River Road is a microcosm of the larger politics of reshaping southern and American heritage tourism and demonstrates the value of industry-engaged, multi-method examinations of different plantation landscapes within the same region.

KEYWORDS:

• African-American
• plantation heritage
• race
• slavery
• River Road
• Louisiana

Notes on contributors

Derek H. Alderman is professor and Head of the Department of Geography at the University of Tennessee. His specialties include social justice, public memory, heritage tourism, and the African-American experience, from slavery to the post-Civil Rights era. He is the founder and co-coordinator of the RESET (Race, Ethnicity, and Social Equity in Tourism) Initiative.

David L. Butler is a professor in the Department of Political Science, International Development and International Affairs at The University of Southern Mississippi. He is an economic and cultural geographer whose interests include heritage, methods of social memory research, and responsible tourism development.

Stephen P. Hanna is a professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Mary Washington. His teaching and research interests include critical cartography and GIS and the interactions of race and memory in the production of tourism destinations, with particular emphasis on the mapping and interpretation of spatial narratives at historical sites.