Search

This article concerns material art, the atmospheres they create, and the affects they engender in their audiences. It is about how the works of art at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice (NMPJ) in Montgomery, Alabama, work to create an atmosphere that enrolls its visitors as empathetic witnesses to the lynchings documented throughout the memorial. The NMPJ is an affecting landscape where visitors learn of the ugly extralegal history of lethal violence against African Americans in the United States. Through a textual analysis of Web-posted Google reviews of the NMPJ, the affecting work that art performs on its viewers is revealed. The NMPJ compels its visitors to both feel and think about a brutal U.S. past and in so doing, it presences the absented victims of lynchings. The NMPJ is not only a place of remembering, but it is a place of re-membering—a reattaching of the lost dead into the narrative body of the U.S. story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent does local variation exist in the expressed interests of planta- tion museum tourists? While the study of plantation museums is of growing importance in the tourism literature, these existing studies have tended to focus on a single site or a single region. This study examines data collected at several southern plantations across multiple smaller areas in the U.S. Southeast. Specifically, we are curious about tourists' interests in select topics, such as slavery and the role of women on the plantation, among others in three regions: River Road, Louisiana; Charleston, South Carolina; and James River, Virginia. We hypothesize that each region has absorbed different local identities and histories that constitute multiple Souths. Employing conditional inference trees on plantation museum tourist interest ratings and rankings, we find varying social representations by in these local communities, with interest in Enslaved playing an important role in the variation of these imaginings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent does local variation exist in the expressed interests of planta- tion museum tourists? While the study of plantation museums is of growing importance in the tourism literature, these existing studies have tended to focus on a single site or a single region. This study examines data collected at several southern plantations across multiple smaller areas in the U.S. Southeast. Specifically, we are curious about tourists' interests in select topics, such as slavery and the role of women on the plantation, among others in three regions: River Road, Louisiana; Charleston, South Carolina; and James River, Virginia. We hypothesize that each region has absorbed different local identities and histories that constitute multiple Souths. Employing conditional inference trees on plantation museum tourist interest ratings and rankings, we find varying social representations by in these local communities, with interest in Enslaved playing an important role in the variation of these imaginings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Museums and heritage tourism sites are highly curated places of memory work whose function is the assembling and ordering of space and narrative to contour visitors' experiences of the past. Variations in such experiences within and between sites, however, necessitates a method that: (1) captures how guides, visitors, and exhibits interact within spaces when representing and performing history and (2) allows researchers to document those variations. We developed narrative mapping, a mobile and geographically sensitive form of participant observation, to enable museum scholars and professionals to systematically capture, visualize, and interpret tendencies and variations in the content, affective qualities, and spatial arrangements of museum narratives over multiple sites and across multiple tours at the same site. Two antebellum plantation museum case studies, Laura Plantation in Louisiana and Virginia's Berkeley Plantation, demonstrate the method's utility in documenting how stories are spatially configured and materially enlivened in order to analyze the ways enslaved persons are placed within these narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, structured as a prompt-and-response work, is authored by members of a research team investigating how slavery is absent and present at tourism plantation museums in the U.S. South. The prompt for the discussion grew out of E. Arnold Modlin's concern that, even at museums where narratives and landscapes center on enslaved people, the presence of the master and enslaver within the same space ensures that once-enslaved people are always commemorated as less than fully human subjects. In response to Modlin's prompt, Perry L. Carter, Amy E. Potter, Candace Forbes Bright, and Stephen P. Hanna deploy their field experiences as well as various literature to envision ways Southern plantation museums can and must more fully and justly commemorate enslaved persons. Derek H. Alderman, as discussant, situates this exchange within the rapidly developing literature on black geographies and emphasizes the entire research team's call for geographers to engage, or even intervene, with ongoing memory work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines two southern Louisiana plantation museums: Laura and Oak Alley, using a framework that stresses the narrative power and politics of these heritage sites. Located a mile from each other along the Mississippi River, they present two similar yet different narratives of the antebellum American South. Laura places more emphasis on the enslaved who inhabited the plantation than does Oak Alley, whose narrative centers upon the opulence of the plantation home – that is, ‘the big house'. This study explores what visitors take away from their plantation tours. Specifically, it examines their thoughts about how the enslaved are represented at these two museums. The study's data come from visitors’ comments posted on the travel website TripAdvisor. The object of the study is to gain a greater understanding of what visitors learn about the history of the enslaved on these tours and how they participate, along with site managers, in the narrative construction of the plantation and negotiating the divide between tourism as amusement and tourism as memorial. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper deals with race, space and leisure travel. It enquires into the differences between African-American and White travel behaviour while challenging existing theoretical explanations for these differences. This work aims to extend previous research on racialized leisure through utilizing a multi-method, multiple data sources approach to illustrate and then elucidate racial differences in behaviour. The findings of the study suggest that racialization of space is the primary factor influencing African-American travel behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nella Larsen's 1929 novel, Passing, is a psychological drama centering around two fair-skinned women. One, Clare Kendry, passes as the White wife of a financially successful racist; the other, Irene Redfield, is a 'race woman' living in upper Manhattan during the era of the Renaissance Harlem. Clare and Irene are undecidables, neither White nor Black, fluid subjects traversing the boundaries of race - passing. Passing is an act of insinuating oneself into forbidden spaces by jettisoning former identities. It is as much a transgression of spatial boundaries as it is of racial boundaries. In the novel Clare passes by merely crossing from Black space into White space, and along the way shedding a Black identity for a White one. This paper examines the mobility of identities across racial geographies and how this movement destabilizes notions of race and of raced spaces. We encounter the world in our bodies, and through our bodies' most exquisitely sensitive sense, our skins, we take the world into ourselves. We have made and remade a world where nearly every experience is shaded and shaped by the color of those bodies, the tones of those skins. (Jane Lazarre, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: memoir of a White mother of Black sons, 1997, p. 94) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]